PROTOPLASM ALONE LIVING. 105 



living matter in organisms with a complicated struc- 

 ture. Indeed in this Beale stands alone among living 

 physiologists, just as Fletcher did nearly forty years 

 ago. The doctrine has hardly even been properly 

 criticized as yet ; in fact, its significance has not been 

 fully grasped, and people seem to be satisfied without 

 further thought that a system which makes four-fifths 

 of a man, including the muscles and nerve-cords, to be 

 nothing but dead matter, must be an error of some 

 kind. And this, with the erroneous ideas that it rests 

 solely on the carmine staining process and requires the 

 revival of the vital principle, further indisposes them 

 to give the theory the attention it merits. Even those 

 who have adopted Dr. Beale's anatomical ideas, and 

 to a great extent those on the formation of tissues and 

 secretions, hesitate to accept to the full the essentiality 

 of the absolute and unfathomable distinction between 

 dead and living matter, and that the latter must 

 always be structureless and semi-fluid. 



For instance, Dr. Carpenter expresses his general approval 

 of Beale's doctrines, but in his edition of 1865 he still states 

 that " new cells may originate in one of two principal modes ; 

 either directly from a previously existing cell, or by an entirely 

 new process in the midst of an organizable blastema." Pro- 

 fessor Tyson comments on this inconsistency, for it is obvious 

 that this last mode is incompatible with Beale's theory. Pro- 

 fessor Tyson himself, however, follows Carpenter in admitting 

 that the formative power may reside in the germinal matter, 

 but that we cannot, on that account, deny vitality to many 

 kinds of formed material, inasmuch as they, e.g., the nerves 

 and muscles, perform vital functions. It is obvious that both 

 these commentators have either failed to appreciate the car- 

 dinal point in Beale's system, or they deny the truth of it. In 

 the "Journal of Anatomy and Physiology " for 1867, the re- 



