THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF LIFE 



271 



ing period of the acceptance of the conclusion in its full 

 significance. 



De Bary. — ^^'c find, then, in the middle years of the 

 nineteenth century the idea launched that sarcodc and pro- 

 toplasm are identical, but it was not yet definitely established 



Fig. 86. — Ferdinand Cohn, 1828-1898. 



that the sarcodc of lower animals is the same as the living 

 substance of the higher ones, and there was, therefore, lacking 

 an essential factor to the conclusion that there is only one 

 general form of living matter in all organisms. It took 

 another ten years of investigation to reach this end. 



The most important contributions from the botanical side 

 during this period were the splendid researches of De Bary 

 (Fig. 87) on the myxomycetes, published in 1859. Here the 

 resemblance between sarcode and protoplasm was brought out 



