CONCERNING PROTOPLASM. 75 



ever- increasing complexity, and protoplasm-force may thus be in- 

 tensified, and, by the mechanism of organisation, turned to the best 

 possible account ; but we must still go back to protoplasm as a 

 naked, formless plasma, if we would find, freed from all non-essential 

 complications, the agent to which has been assigned the duty of build- 

 ing up structure, and of transforming the energy of lifeless matter into 

 that of living." 



How much nearer to the great question of the origin and nature 

 of life do such considerations lead us ? is a justifiable query which 

 faces us at the close of these inquiries, as it formed the key-note with 

 which we began our brief study of the mystery of living and being. 

 It cannot be doubted that the research of recent years has at least 

 brought us nearer to our real difficulties than before. It counts for 

 something in a subject like the present that even the boundaries of 

 our knowledge and the environments of our ignorance should be 

 clearly perceived ; and this much, at least, the inquiries concern- 

 ing protoplasm have accomplished. We now know that at last we 

 are face to face with the final stage in the question before us that 

 the puzzles of protoplasm collectively constitute the one mystery of life. 

 To such a decision, every fact of recent research seems to lead. The 

 knowledge that there is not one life of the animal and another existence 

 of the plant, but that both lives are really similar in their essential 

 manifestations, is one fact which leads us directly to regard proto- 

 plasm and its constitution as the repositories of the secret of life's 

 nature. One consideration which merits special remark in con- 

 nection with the subject of protoplasm and its relations to life 

 exists in the apparent truism that all forms of protoplasm, how- 

 ever alike in appearance and composition science may and does 

 declare them to be, are not identical in their potentialities. 

 They do not, in other words, all possess similar powers of becoming 

 similar organisms. The speck which remains an Amoeba, has no 

 power of evolving from its substance a higher form of life. The 

 protoplasmic spore of a seaweed is a seaweed still, despite its 

 similarity to other or higher forms of plant-germs. The germ of the 

 sponge, again, remains possessed of the powers which can convert 

 it into a sponge alone. And the differences between such protoplasmic 

 specks and the germ which is destined to evolve the human frame 

 can only be declared as of immense extent, and as equalling in their 

 nature the wide structural and functional distinctions we draw betwixt 

 the sponge and the man. Of such differences in the inherent nature 

 of protoplasm under different conditions we are as yet in complete 

 ignorance. Their elucidation is really the explanation of heredity or 

 the law of likeness. The mystery why family face and features, 

 along with even habits and gestures, should be rigidly and perfectly 

 transmitted from parent to offspring, really includes the puzzle which 



