The Unity of tlte Organism 



stituting living organisms has been vastly increased since 

 Schultze and Briicke wrote, hardly needs affirmation. This 

 greatly augmented store of knowledge may well be regarded 

 for a moment in the light of the circumstances referred to 

 some pages back. One outcome of later work has been a 

 serious questioning of the scientific desirability of longer 

 retaining the word "protoplasm." To be sure, this ques- 

 tion was not raised primarily because of interpretations of 

 the substance of the cells of different organisms, but rather 

 because of interpretations placed upon different substances 

 in the same ceU. Strasburgcr, who seems to have been the 

 first to depart from Schultze's sharp distinction between the 

 protoplasm of the cell and the nucleus, was led to this by 

 determinations made largely by himself, which had accu- 

 mulated during the two decades of research since Schultze 

 wrote, that the nucleus is by no means the simple, homo- 

 geneous thing it appeared to the earlier investigators, but 

 has itself an elaborate organization, portions of which re- 

 semble protoplasm in many respects. 



Not without significance is the fact that beginning about 

 the same time the 'custom has grown up of using the term 

 plasm or plasma instead of protoplasm. It is not unusual 

 to regard these words as exactly synonymous, and to sup- 

 pose the only advantage in plasma is its brevity. Obviously 

 the term is more non-committal in meaning than is proto- 

 plasm, the idea of a "first formed substance" being undoubt- 

 edly very different from that of merely a "formed sub- 

 stance." But Strasburger's proposal went further than 

 merely to name the whole cell substance protoplasm. He 

 proposed to replace it by cytoplasm for that part of the 

 cell to which alone Schultze had applied the word proto- 

 plasm, and to call the portion in the nucleus nucleo plasm. 

 This last, being a mongrel word, was soon replaced by 

 karyoplasm. 



In other words, the change in the scope and meaning of 



