1879.]. A Speculation on Protoplasm. 423 
tion to be the necessary concomitants of life. Others reject the 
latter on the ground that animals, like the working bees and the 
sterile ants, not to speak of the hybrids, do not fulfill it. 
All seem to agree that life is a manifestation of force, but so is 
crystallization. Crystallization, or inorganic life, however, seems 
to differ from organic life in this, that the ultimate components of 
the structure due to the latter are cells or irregularly-shaped sacs 
with or without skin, nucleus and nucleolus, and if this cell is 
broken up into parts it does not simply become two smaller but 
similar bodies, but either commences to disintegrate and fall to 
pieces or remains a broken and dead cell. In the former case the 
smallest constituent part yet reached is similar to, or at least con- 
nected by, rigid geometrical laws with the largest form in which 
it manifests itself. 
By inductions based by mineralogical microscopists on the 
analogies in the behavior of matter in the magnetic field and in 
polarized light, it is rendered probable that each of the constituent 
molecules of a crystal is allied to the crystal itself in its form, 
and that both forms are due to what might be called stereo- 
polarity, or the interplay of several (č. e., more than two) polar 
forces acting along different axes,.which holds the molecules of 
solids together, and gives the latter their characteristie forms. 
The results would necessarily be the repetitions of the same 
form or of the crystallographic analogues of that form (i. e., 
different derivations in the same crystal system) and the growth 
of monsters which are so often met with. 
Supposing this definition then to stand, the difference between 
organic growth and crystal growth would be that in the one case 
the product is dissimilar, in the other similar to the component 
parts.? 
But is a fundamental distinction reached here ? 
Is it possible that beyond the range of the microscope there 
are minute forms composing these cells which are each in itself 
geometrically regular, yet constituting in the aggregate an ungeo- 
metrical body as the starting point for life-building ? 
Considering molecules of matter as inert and acted upon simul- 
1 The curious effects produced by the twin structure of crystals, as for example 
the production of an apparently hexagonal crystal by the union of several which are 
rhombic (chrysoberyl, etc.), offers no exception to the rule since the analogy spoken 
of still exists between the rhombic (?) molecule and each twin, 
