80 ADAPTATION AND DISEASE 



distinction of style that is a pure delight, but with little more 

 than a page devoted to the essential nature of growth of living 

 matter, and that page upon the text that the older naturalists laid 

 stress upon the fact or statement that inorganic bodies (crystals) 

 grow by agglutination, organic bodies by intussusception. The 

 living cell, he states, 1 grows very much as a piece of glue swells 

 up in water, by " imbibition " or by interpenetration into and 

 throughout its entire substance. From his statement growth 

 might be nothing beyond the absorption of water by a semi- 

 fluid, colloid mass. Now one has only to consider a moment to 

 see that " intussusception," " imbibition," " intercalation," are 

 nothing more than bald and blank terms. They are inane ; they 

 cannot possibly explain how two molecules of living matter appear 

 where there was but one before, two grains of wheat where one 

 was put into the ground. Growth is one of the great underlying 

 phenomena of living matter, and zoologists and botanists have, 

 in a simple Topsy-like manner, been satisfied that the pheno- 

 menon occurs, and have been amply content to rest with the 

 demonstration of the stages of mitosis and cell division. 



But what has happened to the cell substance that precedes 

 and impels mitosis ? Obviously there is an increase in the 

 amount of living matter, and this translated into physical terms 

 means a multiplication of the molecules of living matter, or, as 

 I term them, the biophores or biophoric molecules. 2 If we 

 regard these complex proteidogenous molecules as a chain, or 

 more simply as a ring of amino-acid radicles, there is but one 

 way in which this can multiply, namely by the same method as 

 obtains in the growth of a crystal. Let us take the simplest 

 case, that of the crystallization of sodium chloride out of watery 

 solution. We know that when the solution or dilution of the 

 sodium chloride reaches a certain point the salt separates into 

 its constituent ions of sodium and chlorine. But while separated 

 these maintain a certain relationship or association. It is 

 remarkable that the chlorine ions do not escape or volatilize 

 into the air. When the concentration of the solution reaches 



1 Loc. cit. p. 203. 



* I employ this term, introduced by Weismann, rather than manufacture 

 a new term, because our fundamental conception is identical, although it is 

 necessary to point out that our ideas as to the constitution of the biophores do 

 not entirely harmonize, he regarding them as collections of molecules, I as 

 individual molecules. 



