296 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



" living." Properly speaking, protoplasm is neither dead nor alive : it is 

 between the two. 



If we could get together an ounce or a ton of it, we should say it 

 was a substance or mass exhibiting some of the properties of living 

 matter. We could not say it was a living individual. It is simply 

 matter occupying a very high plane in those ascending gradational 

 transformations between the dead and the living: between the simple 

 inorganic constituents of the earth, and those more complex segrega- 

 tions of chemical atoms which finally become surrounded by a limiting 

 insulatory envelope and thus constitute " physiological units," or living 

 beings. But until this formation of units — this individualism — of the 

 mass, protoplasm can not be said to live. 



Of course, the direct transformation of inorganic matter into living 

 animal matter is impossible. There must always occur the intermedi- 

 ate phenomenon of vegetable life. Vegetables can transform the inor- 

 ganic chemical materials of the air and earth into their own structure, 

 but the animal must either feed upon the products produced by the 

 vegetable or upon other animals that have been so fed. No single defi- 

 nition of life, therefore, can include both animal and vegetable life, 

 since the vegetable is an intermediate product between minerals and 

 animals. The evplution of life is a gradational process. Things are 

 not " either dead or alive." Some things, like protoplasm, are between 

 the two. 



