THE WONDERS OF LIFE 



has lately found the most favor. Otto Butschli, of 

 Heidelberg, especially, has endeavored, on the basis of 

 many years of careful study and experiment, to make it 

 the foundation of his view of the plasm. It is undeniable 

 that the living matter of many cells shows a delicate 

 structure which may best be compared with fine soap- 

 suds; innumerable globules are crowded close together 

 in a fluid, and flatten each other by their pressure into 

 polyhedrical shapes. In 1892 Btitschli artificially pro- 

 duced fine oil-suds by beating up cane sugar or potash 

 in olive oil, and then put a small drop of the stuff in a 

 drop of water under the microscope. The small particles 

 of sugar then exercised an attractive action by diffusion 

 on the particles of water; the latter penetrated into the 

 oily matter, released the sugar, and formed tiny vesicles 

 with it. As the vesicles of sugar do not mix with oil, 

 they look like cavities isolated on all sides, and poly- 

 hedrically flattened by mutual pressure. The striking 

 resemblance of this artificially produced "oil soap-suds" 

 to the natural and microscopically visible structures of 

 many kinds of plasm is strengthened from the fact that 

 Butschli, Georg Quincke, and others, have also observed 

 similar flowing movements in both; and as these ap- 

 parently spontaneous movements can be explained 

 physically and reduced to adhesion, imbibition, and 

 other mechanical causes, there seemed a prospect of re- 

 ducing the "vital" movements of the living and flowing 

 plasm to purely physical forces. Quite recently Ludwig 

 Rhumbler, of Gottingen, an authority on the rhizopods, 

 has endeavored to give in this sense a Physical analysis 

 of the vital phenomena in the cell. To-day the froth 

 theory is much the most popular of the many attempts 

 to detect a fine plasm-structure as the essential ana- 

 tomic foundation of an explanation of the physio- 

 logical functions. It must be noted, however, that 

 frequently very different phenomena are confused under 



132 



