The Organism and its Protoplasm 



as St. Anthony was, on seeing or even hearing about proto- 

 plasm. Particularly may we believe Max Schultze, chief 

 among the pioneers in this realm, was not thus defective, 

 for we have explicit information that he was an artist as 

 well as a scientist, and of a highly imaginative, sensitive 

 nature. 1 



Responsibility for the Mystification of Protoplasm 



Great as was Huxley's service in enlightening the rank 

 and file of English-speaking people concerning matters bio- 

 logical, I believe what he did for protoplasm in this way 

 by his renowned address, "On the Physical Basis of Life," 

 he did partly at the cost of "making a Magic," as Kipling 

 would say, of protoplasm. 



A soberly scientific discussion of protoplasm cannot pos- 

 sibly ignore the fact that in the light of the extensive exact 

 knowledge now in our possession, at least one excellent biol- 

 ogist has believed that it would be advantageous to give up 

 the word "protoplasm" altogether, so far as technical biol- 

 ogy is concerned, 2 because at the present time it promotes 

 confusion rather than clearness of thought. And even those 

 who do not hold so extreme a view about tlu- value of the 

 term, still admit that "on many sides the word is used in 

 different ways." For Max Schult/e, to whose writings the 

 legitimate protoplasm doctrine probably owes more than to 

 any other one of the pioneers, the word had connected with 

 it a "quite definite conception." Without taking grounds 

 one way or the other on the question of whether it is or 

 is not desirable to abandon the word, we will look at what 

 came to pass both as concerns concrete knowledge and in- 

 terpretation of the theory of protoplasm between 1861, 

 when Schult/e wrote the phrase just quoted, and 1912, 

 when (). Hertwig last, defended the right of the term to exist 

 even though used in many different senses; for by so doing 



