1880. | Protoplasmic Dynamics. 241 
2. Supportive, for maintaining the normal relative position of 
parts and opposing gravity. 
3. Prehensional, including all kinds of manipulatory actions. 
4. Peristaltive, the motor actions of hollow organs on their con- 
tents, embracing swallowing, gastrition, peristaltition, the contrac- 
tions of sphincters, the heart, blood-vessels (circulative), &c. 
VilIl.—The molar and mass-impact and frictional wear and 
tear from the above operations yield mechanical heat and elec- 
tricity with structural degeneration. 
IX.—To maintain the conditions of all these activities the com- 
bining process must go on intermittingly or constantly. The 
fractional molecules must unite with each other, with imbibed 
food-constituents (nutritive assimilation) or with oxygen. 
X.—From this we have chemical heat and electricity with the 
processes of protoplasmic extraction, secretion and excretion of 
fluids, Though heat and electricity must naturally appear more 
or less from all the chemical unions in plasma of whatever tissues, 
we may look upon the oxidizing process as the greatest source of 
chemical heat, while the ganglial and muscle cells are to be 
looked upon as the batteries in which chemical combination 
generates most of the neural electricity. To illustrate the rela- 
tions existing here, we may suppose the light to cause molecular 
agitation in the retinal nerve-ending and to propagate itself inward. 
Entering the ganglial plasma, it frees attractions, whence recom- 
bination results, generating nerve electricity discharged along the 
motor nerve and naturally causing some chemical reaction in it, but 
producing its greatest effect in the terminal muscle cell, which is 
charged as a receiver, the continued agitation keeping its attrac- 
tions freed, sustaining imbibitional zonate expansion with axial- 
contraction, from which mass-motion results. In the so-called — 
voluntary motion it would seem as though the ganglial agitation 
was excited from within and the same consequences follow. 
The recombination occurring in the muscle substance probably 
also generates recurrent electricity, which reacts = the nerve - ee 
centers, us 
Finally, organic combining power is abt only motor power, ee 
but also “growth-force,” the vis a tergo of plasma-nutrition, : 
growth and development, producing (by coöperation with con- 
soning forces) all the diverse and wandani form- a - 
