EDMUND MONTGOMERY—ORGANIC REPRODUCTION. 
15 
individual life are here already definitely located in a still perfectly 
fluent protoplasmic being. 
The ectoderm of higher organisms represents the structural elaboration 
of the relations of the living substance to the sundry stimulating influ¬ 
ences of the medium. The entodermic organs constitute the structural 
fixation of the relations of the living substance to its nutritive or resti- 
tutive resources. The office of the depurative organs is, first, to elimi¬ 
nate the waste products of ectodermic functions, and then also, those of 
the entodermic functions. 
Having gained some little scientific insight into the unitary constitu 
tion of the organic individual, the solution of the problem of reproduc¬ 
tion will naturally conform to it. 
Let us, as has often been done, artificially slice into several pieces our 
highly differentiated trumpet-animalcule. Every slice, however shape¬ 
less, will be seen to reproduce the complete animalcule. How is this 
effected ? There is no other way rationally to account for this astonish¬ 
ing fact of reconstruction than by regarding it as an extreme case of 
chemical reintegration. 
We have seen that the fundamental function of the living substance 
consists in alternate disintegration and reintegration. The shapeless slice 
of the trumpet-animalcule is left a fragment of a chemical whole. By 
dint of its unsaturated chemical affinities it manages by degrees to recon¬ 
struct through assimilation of complemental material the chemical whole 
of which it forms part. This, indeed, is sufficiently wonderful, but it is 
what actually and visibly occurs. 
When an infusorium, such as Paramecium aurelia, the little slipper- 
animalcule, undergoes fissiparous division, its upper half reconstructs a 
lower half, and vice versa. If reproduction is effected by budding, the 
bud has to be regarded as a chemical fragment capable, by force of in- 
wrought affinities, to reintegrate the adult organism. The same with 
every other reproductive germ. 
This gradual process of reintegration is what is called growth; another 
hitherto occult occurrence which receives here its natural explanation. 
Adherents of the cell-theory will object, that, though even all this 
were true so far as unicellular organisms are concerned, the reproduction 
of multicellular beings would demand a different explanation. The an¬ 
swer to this is, that the complex organism is not a multicellular being, 
not a being pierced together by numberless animalcules, called cells, 
which unconsciously and most miraculously co-operate in performing the 
aimfully interdependent functions of life. 
A highly organized infusorium, a so-called unicellular being, encom¬ 
passes within its unitary structure all differentiations essential to life. 
Some lower kinds of turbellaria have hardly more specialized structures 
