THE 
NEW PflYTOIiOGIST. 
Vol. 3, No. 2. February 27TH, 1904. 
RESIDUAL VITALITY: 
AN OUTLINE SKETCH OF OUR KNOWLEDGE OF THE PHYSIOLOGY 
OF THE SUB-NORMAL CELL. 
By F. F. Blackman. 
E VER since 1828 when Wohler broke through the boundary 
between inorganic and organic substances by preparing 
artificially, from its elements, the first complex organic substance 
(urea) identical with one of the products of protoplasmic activity, 
the chemist has progressed steadily towards the goal of depriving 
the living cell of all chemical monopoly. Already, after the capture 
of numerous outworks, the first line of protoplasmic defence has 
been carried by the synthesis of sugars of all kinds in the labor¬ 
atory, and strenuous attack is being made on the second line—the 
synthetic production of proteids. When however there is any 
question of preparing substances on the manufacturing scale or at a 
minimum cost of production, the cell, more especially the green plant¬ 
cell, which is the only real producer among the cells of vegetables 
and animals, leaves the laboratory inevitably far behind owing to 
its one great natural resource—the power of utilising directly the 
energy of the sun to work up carbondioxide, the great waste pro¬ 
duct of all other organic activities. 
In addition to this synthetic attack by chemists intolerant 
of any monopoly of production of any substance whatever by the 
living cell, there has developed in recent years an analytic attack, 
the work of biologists, the aim of which is to break up that aggre¬ 
gate of chemical machinery, the cell, into its constituent machines 
and to obtain these isolated as far as possible and to compel them 
to do their work under simple and controlled environments deter¬ 
mined by the experimenter. 
In this line of work the difficulty of success increases with the 
complexity of the part-machinery that it is sought to isolate from 
