92 Field, Forest, and Wayside Flowers 
So ‘‘cell’” is regarded as a sad misnomer for 
the minute particles of living substance which 
build up the animal or plant body, and some 
modern scientists are striving to get rid of it. 
The name was chosen, in the first place, by a 
microscopist who looked through his lenses at a 
bit of cork, and found that it was made up of 
plates of thin tissue, meeting one another at right 
angles and enclosing empty chambers. He 
thought that the walls were the important part 
of the combination, as indeed they were in this 
particular case, so he called the tissue ‘‘cellular” 
and its component parts he named ‘‘cells.” 
Modern science teaches that in most cases the 
cell-wall is as subordinate to the cell-contents as a 
picture-frame is to the picture it encloses, and 
also that the living units which go to build up 
a plant or animal have a special form for each 
kind of tissue, so that ‘‘cells,” far from being uni- 
formly square, or uniformly six-sided, as_ their 
name might lead us to expect, assume shapes of 
almost infinite variety. But the old, misleading 
name is still in use, mainly because no one has yet 
been able to think of a satisfactory substitute for it. 
In the jelly which fills the leaf-cells there are 
floating specks of green, so vivid in color, and so 
