Property and Common Sense 123 
authorities are believed to stuff their new specimens with 
the skins of old ones ; the matter used by the living proto- 
plasm for this purpose is held to be entirely foreign to 
protoplasm itself, and no more capable of acting in concert 
with it than bricks can understand and act in concert with 
the bricklayer. As the bricklayer is held to be living and 
the bricks non-living, so the bones and skin which proto- 
plasm is supposed to construct are held non-living and the 
protoplasm alone living. Protoplasm, it is said, goes about 
masked behind the clothes or habits which it has fashioned. 
It has habited itself as animals and plants, and we have 
mistaken the garment for the wearer—as our dogs and cats 
doubtless think with Giordano Bruno that our boots live 
when we are wearing them, and that we keep spare paws in 
our bedrooms which lie by the wall and go to sleep when we 
have not got them on. 
If, in answer to the assertion that the osseous parts of 
bone are non-living, it is said that they must be living, 
for they heal if broken, which no dead matter can do, it is 
answered that the broken pieces of bone do not grow to- 
gether; they are mended by the protoplasm which per- 
meates the Haversian canals; the bones themselves are 
no more living merely because they are tenanted by some- 
thing which really does live, than a house lives because men 
and women inhabit it ; and if a bone is repaired, it no more 
repairs itself than a house can be said to have repaired itself 
because its owner has sent for the bricklayer and seen that 
what was wanted was done. 
We do not know, it is said, by what means the structure- 
less viscid substance which we call protoplasm can build for 
itself a solid bone ; we do not understand how an amoeba 
makes its test; no one understands how anything is done 
unless he can do it himself; and even then he probably 
does not know how he has doneit. Set aman who has never 
painted, to watch Rembrandt paint the Burgomaster Six, 
and he will no more understand how Rembrandt can have 
