138 TISSUES IN GENERAL. 



"Allow me to impress this fact upon you, that these are 

 things which each and every one of you can see for himself if he 

 only has a good microscope, good eyes, and an unprejudiced mind. 

 Don't look for any so-called ' cells/ and don't imagine, as I used 

 to do, that it is given to only a favored few to be able to pene- 

 trate these mysteries of nature. The only danger is that you 

 become so much fascinated with histological investigations as to 

 neglect other important things. 



" It is the merit of Heitzmann to have discovered, in the first 

 place, that the living matter in its simple form, as seen in an 

 amoeba, the so-called basis-matter of life, to which hitherto the 

 name of protoplasma has been applied, but which I propose to 

 designate as bioplasson, is not without structure, as has before 

 his accurate investigations been supposed, and that its structure 

 is that of a net-work, in the meshes of which the bioplasson fluid, 

 or the not contractile, not living portion of the organism exists. 

 He discovered that the granules, which had been observed before, 

 are not foreign or accidental occurrences, but that they are part 

 and parcel of the living matter that, in fact, they are the thick- 

 ened points of intersection of the threads of bioplasson consti- 

 tuting the living net- work. Extending his investigations, he 

 found that what was true of the structure of bioplasson in the 

 amoeba, where a single unit-mass of living matter constitutes the 

 entire individual, is true of the structure of bioplasson of all, 

 even the highest, living organisms. The idea connected with the 

 word cell, when this term was first applied to the organic form 

 element, had, with the advance of microscopical and histological 

 knowledge, gradually undergone such changes that the name had 

 become a complete misnomer. Although i cells ' were still spoken 

 of, it was understood that their essential constituent was living 

 matter individualized into small, distinct masses. The existence 

 in these of a nucleus, a nucleolus, even a nucleolinus and gran- 

 ules, was known j even thorns and processes had been observed 

 occasionally. But all this knowledge of the structure of these 

 elementary masses was fragmentary, until Heitzmann announced 

 that the nucleus, nucleolus, granules, and threads are really the 

 living contractile matter ; that it is arranged in a net- work con- 

 taining in its meshes the non-contractile matter which is trans- 

 formed into the various kinds of matrix characterizing different 

 tissues ; and that the tissue unit-masses of bioplasson throughout 

 the whole body are interconnected with fine threads of the same 

 living matter. 



