CHAPTER V. 



ANATOMICAL CONSTITUTION OF ORGANISED BODIES. 



EVERYWHERE and always, as we have already expounded, the 

 living or organised bodies are constituted by complex substances, 

 in part albuminoidal, and in that special physical state which is 

 called colloidal. The fundamental matter of these living bodies 

 is uncrystallisable. " To live and to crystallise," says Ch. Robin, 

 " are two properties which are never united " (Elements Ana- 

 tomiques, p. 17). It is enough in effect for a body to be endowed 

 with the humblest of vital properties, nutrition, not to be 

 crystallisable. At the same time living substances are im- 

 pregnated with crystalloidal solutions and with gases : this is a 

 general attribute ; but in the form this attribute is extremely 

 diversified. At the lowest degrees of the organic world we find 

 beings without structure, amorphous : for instance, the genus 

 Amoeba and the genus Monas ; they are small contractile albu- 

 minoidal masses whose form is modified incessantly. Such are 

 also the simplest rhizopods, living masses rather more con- 

 siderable, but without definite form ; we see them emitting and 

 reabsorbing tentaculifonn prolongations of varying length. But 

 if even in a small degree we study by the help of the microscope 

 'the structure of beings more elevated in the living hierarchy, we 

 instantly see that the fundamental mass has lost its homogeneous- 

 ness, that it has fractionised itself into corpuscles generally 

 invisible to the naked eye. These small bodies, these living 

 bricks which by their aggregation constitute every organic edifice 

 a little complex, have been called anatomical elements or histologicai 

 elements. 



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