12 PREFACE. 



instance, to be your description also of protoplasm in general 

 and in all instances. Reference to a sentence or two will prove 

 this : " Not the sting only," Mr Huxley tells us, " but the whole 

 substance of the nettle is made up of a repetition of such masses 

 of nucleated protoplasm." Further, possession is expressly 

 inferred " by many other organic forms " of such protoplasm as 

 is possessed by the nettle ; and when he talks of " the com- 

 parison of such a protoplasm to a body with an internal cir- 

 culation," " put forward by an eminent physiologist," he has no 

 idea whatever, he says, of confining this comparison to the 

 protoplasm of the nettle sting. He says also : " Currents 

 similar to those of the hairs of the nettle have been observed 

 in a great multitude of very different plants, and weighty 

 authorities have suggested that they probably occur in more or 

 less perfection in all young vegetable cells." And, immediately 

 thereafter, in a burst of poetry as exuberant as the very vegeta- 

 tion he describes, he proceeds as follows : " If such be the 

 case, the wonderful noonday silence of a tropical forest is, after all, 

 due only to the dulness of our hearing and could our ears catch 

 the murmurs of these tiny Maelstroms, as they whirl in the 

 innumerable myriads of living cells which constitute each tree, we 

 should be stunned as with the roar of a great city" Surely there 

 is here an extension ample enough to warrant me in assuming 

 Mr Huxley to believe the same description to apply to proto- 

 plasm in general, which applied to the nettle hair in particular. 

 But the main interest turned on circulation : that Strieker denied 

 to exist in protoplasm in general. Was I wrong, then, in an 

 argument that sought only an accumulation of differences, to 

 quote, as opposing Mr Huxley's so unexceptive authority for 

 circulation, Strieker's equally decided authority against it? 

 Why, too, should Mr Huxley cry shame on me for adducing 

 the evidence of authorities, and not of my own eyes ? Had he 

 himself not already set me the example? What are these 

 " weighty authorities " he alludes to, and what is the effect of 

 them ? Is not that effect to " commend the poisoned chalice to 

 his own lips ? " " Why in the world did not this distinguished " 

 Biologist "look for himself" at all these " young vegetable 

 cells " and " tropical forests," " before venturing to speak a 

 word about the matter at all ? " 



But I have not yet given Mr Huxley's description of proto- 

 plasm one half the extension he himself gives it. " The proto- 



