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170 THE NORTHERN MICROSCOPIST. 

protoplasm. You may have matter endowed permanently with 
the properties of gold, or silver, or hydrogen ; but the matter com- 
mon to and underlying them all is not discoverable. 
You must therefore, if you have matter at all, have it specialised, 
endowed with certain properties. 
It is so with protoplasm. It is never within our reach as an 
unspecialised compound. We know it as the protoplasm of a 
mushroom, or an oak, or an amceba, or a sparrow, and therefore 
with the special properties belonging to that and to nothing else. 
Living stuff is the product of living things. Living things are 
developed according to known and discoverable laws, as rigid as 
those which determine the composition of carbonic acid or chloride 
of sodium, only more complex. 
All the living things with which we are acquainted originate in 
an egg, or a seed, or their equivalents ; or else in the multiplication 
of forms already existing, by fission. 
But are not the processes of multiplication rigid and determinate? 
Take a group of primitive ova. Let them represent forms so 
diverse as the Stentor, the Daphnia, the Trout, the Pig, and Man. 
Physically, chemically, optically, they are alike: the severest effort 
and most rigid scrutiny can discover no essential difference between 
them. But is there no difference? Nothing can be more incon- 
ceivably diverse than the possibilities that are enfolded in those 
germs. But no one supposes that they will either of them be 
recreant to their mission and do the work of the other ! 
Is it conceivable that the stentor could hatch out into a trout, 
or that the trout ovum could perchance produce a rabbit? No; 
these eggs have their laws as much as the molecules of carbon or 
of chlorine. 
But, say my opponents, it is of the protoplasm of the cells of 
living things, not of the mission of the egg, that we argue. 
And what, I would ask, is the protoplasm of the cell but the out- 
come and product of the egg? And what is the whole economy of 
organisation but the specialised function of grouped cells? A 
sponge is a bundle of living cells with varying but mutually adapted 
endowments. So is a man. Every animal is, in fact, a perfect 
commonwealth of cells adapted and endowed each for its work, 
and all adjusted to each other. 
What is the primitive seed but a cell endowed with a potentiality 
to give origin to other cells, beautifully grouped together, to con- 
stitute a mussel or a man? 
Then why should the protoplasm of individual cells go astray, 
and become capricious, any more than the egg from which they 
sprang, and from which they become possessed of their peculiar 
and inherited qualities? ‘True, it is now an established fact in 
biology that the products of eggs are never precisely alike. There 
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