120 THE STORY OF THE LIVING MACHINE. 



thus the animal or plant, instead of consisting of 

 a large number of separate independent cells, con- 

 sists of one great mass of living matter which is 

 aggregated into little centres, each commonly hold- 

 ing a nucleus. Such a conclusion is not yet dem- 

 onstrated, nor is its significance very clear should 

 it prove to be a fact ; but it is plain that such sug- 

 gestions quite decidedly modify the conception of 

 the body as a community of independent cells. 



There is yet another line of thought which is 

 weakening this early conception of the cell doc- 

 trine. There is a growing conviction that the 

 view of the organism, simply as the sum of the 

 activities of the individual cells, is not a correct 

 understanding of it. According to this extreme 

 position, a living thing can have no organization 

 until it appears as the result of cell multiplica- 

 tion. To take a concrete case, the egg of a starfish 

 can not possess any organization corresponding 

 to the starfish. The egg is a single cell, and the 

 starfish a community of cells. The egg can, 

 therefore, no more contain the organization of a 

 starfish than a hunter in the backwoods can 

 contain within himself the organization of a great 

 metropolis. The descendants of individuals like 

 the hunter may unite to form a city, and the de- 

 scendants of the egg cell may, by combining, give 

 rise to the starfish. But neither can the man con- 

 tain within himself the organization of the city, nor 

 the egg that of the starfish. It is, perhaps, true 

 that such an extreme position of the cell doctrine 

 has not been held by any one, but thoughts very 

 closely approximating to this view have been held 

 by the leading advocates of the cell doctrine, and 

 have beyond question been the inspiration of the 

 development of that doctrine. 



