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POPULAR SCIENCE REVIEW. 
case of sexual generation) all its specific, and even a part of 
its personal characters. 
From this incapacity of the protoplasmic masses to exceed 
a certain size, it follows, necessarily, that all the creatures 
which exceed this size, must be formed of several distinct masses 
of protoplasm, and, in one word, will he colonies. Thus the 
generality of the law of association is shown to be a con- 
sequence of one of the fundamental properties of proto- 
plasm. 
The latter constantly breaking up into distinct masses, 
these masses, which there is nothing to bind together more 
directly, are each modified in a particular way under the in- 
fluence of external agents, and thus has been introduced into 
nature that marvellous variety which strikes us with admira- 
tion ; it is an immediate consequence, like the law of association, 
of the obligation imposed upon protoplasm to divide into small 
distinct individualities. 
Now what is the nature of protoplasm ? Struck with its 
homogeneity, and with the identity of the elements composing 
it with those which form albumenoid substances, it has been 
thought that it was a mere chemical compound, and it has 
even been a question whether it might not be possible to 
produce it artificially — whether man might not be able to 
rekindle the torch of Prometheus and create life at his own 
pleasure — a serious question, which, I believe, has only been 
put in consequence of a strange confusion of words. If it be 
true that the substances which form living matter are the same 
as those which enter into certain chemical compounds, we cannot 
conclude from this that protoplasm is one of these compounds. 
The characteristic of a chemical compound is fixity of com- 
position ; the composition of protoplasm, on the contrary, changes 
incessantly, without any of its fundamental properties being 
modified. New substances are constantly entering into its 
mass, while others issue from it ; protoplasm is in a state of 
perpetual decomposition and recomposition ; it is not its 
chemical composition that characterizes it, but the mode in 
which it is incessantly decomposing and recomposing itself ; 
everything in it is in movement, and, properly speaking, it is 
this movement that characterizes life. 
Life is therefore nothing but a combination of motions, or, 
if it be preferred, a mode of motion of which certain substances 
alone are capable, and which is not without some analogies 
with those whirling motions to which certain eminent physicists 
ascribe the formation and the properties of the atoms of chemistry. 
AV e might follow out this comparison between the atoms and 
protoplasms, and employ it to show that the latter must have 
been fo lined originally in the greatest possible number, that it 
