
INAUGURAL ADDRESS. 15 
walls of the vacuoles within protoplasmic masses or cells ; 
the wall of the primordial utricle; the true fibrous, con- 
nective, elastic, bony or other tissues generally included 
bably the most stable part of the cell, does not remain always the same. 
Nevertheless the shape and individuality of the whole remains permanently 
secured.” —Ziige aus der Biologie des Protoplasmas, p. 4. 
‘* As the mollusk not only builds itself in its shell but moves itself in it, so 
the protoplasm-body in its cell wall. Neither the streams in the bands, nor 
the nucleus, nor the primordial utricle are alone the seat and cause of the 
movement. The whole protoplasm-body, which is not a ‘substance’ but an 
‘organisin,’ moves itself in all its parts, at one time all at once, at another 
alternately, as a single Ameba-like, animated, individual being.’’—Op. cit., 
p. 16. 
These protoplasmic movements and extension of processes are, however, far 
from uniform in extent and intensity and may be apparently absent for long. 
It is probable that by means of such bands and processes a connection 
between the protoplasm of the different cells of plants may be established and 
maintained. For it has been felt as a difficulty how the myriads of cells totally 
separated from each other by dead cell walls, of which a plant is said to consist, 
could co-operate so as to assume by growth and limitation of growth, the com- 
plete predetermined form and otherwise act as a whole. In 1883, Mr. Walter 
Gardiner, after adducing the evidence from Sachs, Hanstein, and Russow, of 
the existence of sieve-like perforations in the contiguous walls of different 
cells, gives his own observations of the actual extension of fine protoplasmic 
filaments through the perforations in the plant cells of several different species 
and concludes that it is extremely probable that ‘not only is continuity of 
protoplasm established from cell to cell in these instances, but that the 
phenomenon is one of much wider, if not of universal occurrence.” —WNature, 
26th February, 1885. 
In 1884, Schaarschmidt, in papers containing the complete history of the 
subject, and much additional observation of his own, asserts the complete 
doctrine of continuity of protoplasm in all plant-cells. He concludes that-— 
1st. The protoplasts of all the tissues in united cells are in direct commu- 
nication by means of finely attenuated protoplasmic threads. 2nd. The con- 
nective threads traverse the pit-closing membrane (which is of a sieve-plate 
structure), while in unpitted cells they traverse directly the cell-wall. By 
these threads is the communication between the connective processes which 
occupy the pit-cavity from both sides directly established. 
The protoplasts of the plants (composed from tissues) form a higher unity— 
one synplast.— Nature, 29th January, 1885. 
The view of some vegetable physiologists that the cytoplasma consists of a 
