MONTGOMERY ON AMCEBOID MOVEMENT 287 



consider it the less necessary to contradict again the 

 doctrine, accepted by Eohde also, of the nervous nature of 

 the hyaloplasm, since it must appear untenable in and for 

 itself, as soon as the correctness of the view concerning 

 protoplasmic structure, put forth by me, is admitted. 



Qi) Montgomery's Hypothesis 



I must say a word or two, in passing, relative to the 

 hypothesis developed by Montgomery (1881 and 1885) 

 with regard to protoplasmic movements. It is not easy to 

 obtain a clear idea of this view, since its founder has con- 

 ceptions of protoplasm and of the forces at work in it, which 

 depart completely from what are usual ; in fact they are on 

 the whole difficult to grasp. Without wishing to attempt a 

 more exact proof of this assertion, I content myself with a 

 reference to the following sentence, which concludes Mont- 

 gomery's work of 1881, and contains, as it were, his con- 

 fession of faith with regard to living matter. " Itself sem- 

 piternal, an indivisible specific totality, bringing back the 

 past to the present, it is in opposition throughout all time 

 to the remainder of transitory nature. It, the living sub- 

 stance, is in the world the truly permanent, and not the 

 dead formless matter." Starting from such conceptions, 

 which recall strongly the past times of the nature-philosophy, 

 Montgomery arrives at the strange view that ordinary 

 physical forces play on the whole no part in protoplasm, and 

 that the living substance is in fact governed only by chemical 

 forces. For this reason, according to him, it is out of the 

 question to talk of an aggregate condition of protoplasm. 

 If any definite idea is to be connected with these assertions, 

 it seems to me to follow from them that Montgomery con- 

 ceives of the entire protoplasm of an organism, in fact even 

 the whole body of a higher animal, as would appear from 

 certain of his applications, as a large chemical molecule, 

 which is in a state of constant decomposition and recon- 

 struction, within which also only chemical forces exert their 

 activities and not the usual forces of molecular physics. 



Montgomery's hypothesis concerning the processes of 



