

264 THE NORTHERN MICROSCOPIST. 
this is evidently not in every case a prophylactic; although it 
certainly has been so in the case of a great majority of working 
Biologists, whether amateur or professional. But we have few of 
us, probably, been called before to witness so remarkable an alleged 
evidence of the nature, persistence, and transmutable power of 
“ Protoplasm ” as was brought before us a little while ago, in which 
we were called on to consider an illustration of the emergence of 
lowly living organisms from what was declared to be transmuted 
“protoplasm of sawdust!” It was gravely asserted that wood saw- 
dust contained protoplasm ; and that this, which it had inherited 
from the tree of which it was a part, had the power heterogeneti- 
cally to become—living organisms. The proof was that bacterial 
and monadic forms had been found in an infusion of which the 
sawdust was the essential ingredient! and it was supposed to be 
the more remarkable, from the fact that the sawdust had been 
prepared from wood which had constituted a pile of an old lake 
dwelling. It consequently had an antiquity, as dead wood, which 
might be greater than that of the historic antiquity of man in 
Europe, and, for aught we really can determine, greater than chro- 
nological antiquity of man upon the earth. Yet, although it is a 
piece torn from a dead tree of such a vast period since, it is sup- 
posed to contain—protoplasm—the life-stuff that gave the tree 
from which it was riven, its vital and physical characteristics—in 
its living entirety? and that this “protoplasm” had the power to 
change itself into separate and specialised living forms ! 
The grounds of this bizarre and incongruous “inference” are 
simply that living forms appeared in the sawdust infusion! which 
is no more and no less than every practical Biologist would expect. 
Anything that will carry “germs” or desiccated septic organisms 
into water that favours, renders possible, or indicates a putrefactive 
state, will rapidly give rise to putrefactive organisms. ‘The “ saw- 
dust” from this lake dwelling pile had been saturated for thousands 
of years with the water of the lake. It doubtless contained germs 
of life in various forms. But unless it were, in the form of minute 
broken particles, introduced into a vessel in such a way as to have 
no contact with the outer air, and to be hermetically enclosed in 
sterilised water, it would be impossible to discover even what these 
germs, contained in this saturated wood, were. But when the 
wood is sawn into “sawdust,” without precaution, and put into an 
ordinary “live-box” for study, what could we expect but living 
products? They must be there, as the experience of the practical 
Biologist has everywhere shown. Some of them would have been 
there equally if it had been bone-dust or stone-dust that had been 
there instead of sawdust. But to argue that such living things 
are the outcome of the “transmuted protoplasm” of the said 
“dust,” is either to ignore, or to be unacquainted with, all the ele- 
