256 HACKEL AMBIGUOUS ON ALBUMEN. 



to contain liquid water, it must have had a beginning. 

 It is, therefore, of the last importance for his doctrines 

 that primitive generation of living from inorganic 

 matter (Archigony) should be proved possible by 

 natural causes. This is a necessity shared by all 

 schools of philosophy which deny the possibility of 

 miraculous interference at any stage of the world's 

 history, and a strong bias is given to reduce to a 

 minimum, and if possible obliterate, the radical dis- 

 tinction between dead and living matter, and to show 

 how one may pass by insensible degrees into the other. 

 "We all know how the presence of a strong wish or 

 prepossession of any kind warps the mind, and in- 

 sensibly perverts the reasoning powers. This is con- 

 spicuously shown in the present instance, where, by 

 constantly speaking of the living matter as albuminous 

 .and the like, Hackel has come to persuade himself 

 that the gulf between the organic and inorganic king- 

 doms is not so great after all. At any rate, he has 

 succeeded in throwing a veil of ambiguity over the 

 -subject, which has produced the misconception of the 

 protoplasmic theory above noticed. In proof of this, 

 I may give a few examples. Speaking of the ovum, 

 he calls it " a little lump of albumen, in which another 

 albuminous body is enclosed the nucleus."* " The 

 nucleus, we can imagine, may arise from purely 

 physical causes by condensation of the innermost 

 central particles of albumen " (p. 306). The Monera 

 are " simple individualized lumps of albumen.''^ These 

 expressions are constantly used, and he speaks also of 



* " Nat. Schopfungs G-eschiclite," 367. 

 t " Gren. Morphologic," i. 182. 



