80 BIOLOGICAL LECTURES. 



rest of the forces of the cosmical universe. The mischievous 

 metaphor, "natural selection," has blinded many naturalists to 

 the real meaning of this expression. 



In the same way we may discuss the characters of other 

 amoeboids. Each is found to have its own kind of plasma, 

 that behaves differently in each species. Some move more 

 rapidly than others, some have blunt, others long, slender or 

 attenuated pseudopodia ; some may have bent pseudopodia, or 

 have the axes of their straight pseudopodia normal to the sur- 

 face of the spherical body of the organism ; others obey a 

 different rule in this respect. In some the plasma is clear, 

 in others more opaque ; in some the nucleus is globular, in 

 others flattened. Thus one might go on and show that the 

 different proportions and behaviors of the same parts, in dif- 

 ferent species, was evidence that totally different molecular 

 mechanisms were simply making their necessarily different 

 responses to the same environment, because of differences 

 in the physical and chemical properties of their constituent 

 plasma. Herein, probably, also lies the whole secret of the dif- 

 ference of power presented by the germs of different creatures. 

 They develop as they do in the case of each species, because 

 of their specific chemical constitutions, and not because there 

 are a lot of "biophores," "gemmules," etc., "superintending" 

 the business of development in a particular way during the 

 evolution of the egg of each form. The preposterous assump- 

 tion that enough energy can be squeezed into an egg poten- 

 tially to carry the materials into place that are assimilated during 

 development in order to build an elephant, for example, is 

 worthy of mediaeval philosophers, but not of those of the close 

 of the nineteenth century. Every form of energy, including 

 that of "life," is correlated, and is amenable to the same laws. 

 Full knowledge of the mode of operation of the material 

 energy-complexes that we call "living," will disclose the true 

 theory of morphology and the true meaning of life as well. 



These, here incompletely reported, observations make it toler- 

 ably clear that amoeboid motion is worth studying, in order to 

 get clear notions of how living motions and energies are oper- 

 ative in one of the simplest organisms known to the zoologist. 



