10 
Transactions Texas Academy of Science. 
set of elementary beings to produce something infinitely more complex 
and more highly developed than themselves. 
It is not difficult to show that in still other respects the cell-theory, 
as a true and consistent interpretation of vital phenomena, is untenable, 
and in its logical consequences self-destructive. It is an essential tenet 
of the cell-theory that the cell is an elementary organism which multi- 
plies by self-division. It should then, like all other organisms, propa- 
gate its own kind, dividing into two equally constituted organisms. The 
two daughter-cells, or elementary organisms, which result from self- 
division, have as lineal descendants to be faithful reproductions of the 
parent cell. In organic propagation like produces like throughout the 
entire scale of living beings, as also seen in the fissiparous division of 
so-called unicellular organisms. 
In outright contradiction to the general law of generation, and to the 
essential tenet of the cell-theory, we find the germ-cell, which is em- 
phatically declared to be a genuine cell, and therefore an elementary or- 
ganism; we find it contrary to all theoretical expectations, and to all 
genuine organic propagation, producing by means of self-division a pro- 
geny differing altogether from itself. For, what remotest resemblance 
has, for instance, a muscle or a nerve-cell to the original parental germ- 
cell, of which they are said to be the lineal offspring ? It is obvious that 
no mechanical, no purely physical explanation can account for an ele- 
mentary germ-cell giving birth in successive generations to other kinds 
of highly differentiated and developed cells, or elementary organism. 
Moreover, no application of atomo-mechanical principles to the self- 
division of so-called cells can render this eminently vital process in the 
least intelligible. For^ even if in accordance with Haeckel, Nageli, and 
others, the cell was really and simply composed of a group of equal vital 
molecules, the multiplication of such molecules, which must in this case 
necessarily preclude the self-division of the cell, remains mechanically 
inconceivable. Vital molecules can not possibly originate mechanically. 
And if the cell is regarded with Bruecke and most biologists of the 
present day, not as an aggregate of equal molecules, but as throughout an 
organized being, it becomes then quite as inconceivable how an organ- 
ism can mechanically divide into two equal parts, each part consisting 
of the same differentiated structure. Surely, it is mechanically unin- 
telligible how, for example, the highly differentiated substance of an 
infusorium can so divide that each half will consist, as it actually does, 
of exactly the same differentiated structure. This vital mode of divi- 
sion, this organized duplication of living beings, surpasses incommensur- 
ably anything that purely mechanical activity can possibly accomplish. 
Reverting now, as of utmost importance to biological interpretation. 
