

SOME MODERN VIEWS OF THE CELL. 603 



SOME MODERN VIEWS OF THE CELL. 



By JAMES ELLIS HUMPHREY. 



HARDLY more than a generation ago naturalists were form- 

 ing, under the lead of the great Englishman, those concep- 

 tions of organic development and of the blood relationship of 

 living beings resulting from common descent which have formed 

 the starting point of almost all subsequent research. During the 

 same years in which Mr. Darwin was accumulating the facts 

 which were to form the imperishable foundations of his super- 

 structure, various German investigators were gradually recording 

 the observations that have afforded equally secure grounds for 

 that view of the essential substance of living organisms which 

 found expression at about the same time with the development 

 theory, and which has exercised a hardly less profound influence 

 upon biological investigation the protoplasm theory. 



But the beginnings of our knowledge of the intimate structure 

 of plants and animals reach back two centuries further to the 

 work of an English physicist and optician, Robert Hooke. This 

 man, desiring to demonstrate his improvements in the manu- 

 facture of magnifying glasses, published in a volume entitled 

 Micrographia, or some Physiological Descriptions of Minute 

 Bodies made by Magnifying Glasses, in 1667, accounts of the ap- 

 pearance of various objects when viewed with his lenses. Among 

 the objects upon which he had chanced was a piece of cork, and 

 this he found to consist of a series of empty cavities separated by 

 thin partitions, to which cavities he gave the name of cells, from 

 their suggestion of the cells of a honeycomb. But although we 

 now know that cork is a dead issue which no longer contains any 

 essential component of the living cells, and although our concep- 

 tion of a cell is to-day quite opposed to that of a tightly closed 

 chamber, such as the name implies, yet Hooke's name, given so 

 long ago to the dead shell, is still retained for the living reality. 

 And here we have one more example of the operation of that 

 interesting conservatism of the human mind which perpetuates 

 established terms or customs or beliefs long after their original 

 fitness and raison d'etre have been outgrown. 



Hooke's work was only one phase of the extraordinary scien- 

 tific activity that characterized his time. The first fruit of the 

 splendid awakening of the human mind from the paralysis of 

 scholasticism which we owe to the Baconian philosophy was a 

 zeal for the study of Nature ; and from this period date some of 

 the most brilliant discoveries in natural science. It is a notable 

 coincidence that in the year 1671 there were presented to the 

 lately established, but already famous, Royal Society of London 



