12 
Transactions Texas Academy of Science. 
have not been themselves hypothetically endowed. In the same way, as- 
sumed vital units, in order plausibly to explain real vital efficiencies, 
have themselves to be hypothetically endowed with these very same effi- 
ciencies; which means in plain language that biologists are practicing 
here a delusive trick upon themselves. 
Furthermore, molecular theories are evidently destructive of the cell- 
theory, from which they confidently started. For cells composed of a 
■cluster of autonomous, self-dividing or otherwise multiplying vital units, 
as all cells are supposed to be according to molecular theories, such col- 
lective cells can no longer be regarded as being themselves autonomous 
organic beings, capable of propagating as such their own kind by means of 
self-division, as they ought to in accordance with the tenets of the cell- 
theory. It is in this case the separate units that propagate, not the cells. 
Nowise can theories working with elementary vital units cast any 
steadfast light on vital phenomena. Rightly to explain the propagation 
of living beings, be they vital units or complex organisms, it has first 
to be shown by what means protoplasm, of which they all consist, manages 
to be alive, to be in fact, a living substance; how it is able to assimilate 
and vitalize nutritive material; how it comes to grow thereby from a 
morphologically undifferentiated tiny germ to highly differentiated and 
■organized adult stature; and how it eventually produces new germs 
capable of repeating the vital process of reproduction. These fundamen- 
tal problems have first to be solved before biology as a science of vital 
phenomena can be said to be erected on a sound basis. And I venture to 
predict that before long a satisfactory solution will be found for all these 
hitherto occult problems. 
In order to accomplish this task the organic individual has, above all, 
to be recognized as forming one single indiscerptible whole, and not — 
as hitherto assumed — as consisting of a vast assemblage of other elemen- 
tary beings. And then, the purely mechanical interpretation of vital 
phenomena, which is still attempted, will have to give way to what may 
rightly be called Neovitalism ; a vitalism, namely, which does not, like 
the old vitalism, invoke as actuating agent the intervention of some Deus 
ex machina ; but a vitalism which positively demonstrates the inherent 
activity of agencies specifically operative in the production of vital phe- 
nomena. 
As regards the first of these desiderata, the recognition, namely, of the 
unity of- the organic individual, speedy headway has lately been made in 
this direction. Leading botanists have actually or virtually forsaken the 
cell-theory in favor of organic unity. Strasburger, in an inaugural ad- 
dress delivered 1891, as Rector of the University of Bonn, says: “Until 
recently it was accepted that there existed no communication between the 
