Annual Address by the President. IS 
plasms of plant-cells. It had to be asked, how, under such conditions, 
is the co-operation of the sundry cells in the service of the organism as 
a whole at all possible, and how can the plant, as a unitary being, be 
thus formed ? The problem found its solution in the discovery that the 
plasm of the different cells is connected by protoplasmic filaments. These 
traverse from cell to cell, and cause thus the living substance of a plant 
to be continuous. The plant, therefore, like the animal, constitutes a 
unitary, living organism.” Pfeffer in his work, “Die Entwinklung,” 1895, 
recognizes, that “all cells form equally participating parts of the whole 
continuous protoplasmic body.” And Professor Vines, in his address as 
president of the botanical section of the British Association, 1900, de- 
clares that “the general continuity of the protoplasm of cellular plants 
has been established. Hence the body is no longer regarded as an aggre- 
gate of cells, but as a more or less septated map of protoplasm.” 
These are unequivocal dismissals of the cell-theory on the part of 
prominent botanists. This eminently plausible theory, grounded on ac- 
tual appearances and sociological analogies, has hitherto completely domi- 
nated biological science, and has led astray the most acute and skillful 
investigators. Considering that it first originated with the botanist 
Schleiden, its rejection now in the botanical field, as no longer applicable 
to plants, may be considered a hopeful sign that the unity of the animal 
organism will also soon be scientifically established. Indeed, among zo- 
ologists there are already many signs that a transition is being effected 
from the view which regards the organism as an aggregation of a multi- 
plicity of vital units, to that which recognizes its essential unity. The 
results of experimental ontogeny, and of experimental regeneration, leave, 
in fact, no doubt that the organism is an indiscerptible whole, and by 
no means an assemblage of aggregating and co-operating elementary 
lives. 
In 1888 Eoux killed one of the two blastomeres, or “cells,” into which 
the egg first divides on its course towards ontogenetic reproduction, and 
the result — confirmed by a number of competent observers — was, that a 
complete half-embryo evolved from the uninjured blastomere. This fact 
alone suffices to overthrow the cell-theory. For, according to this theory, 
the two blastomeres resulting from the self-division of the germ-cell, as 
a mother-cell, should be each an autonomous self-rounded daughter-cell, 
in every respect equal to one another, and equal also to the mother-cell. 
Instead of this, they are found to be two complemental halves of one and 
the same whole. The germ-cell, therefore, does not divide in order to 
propagate its own kind, as demanded by the cell-theory. But it divides 
in order to evolve symmetrically the two halves of the one organism which 
is being ontogenetically reproduced. And all subsequent divisions or 
