20 LIVERPOOL BIOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 
protoplasm consists of active albumen and ceases to be protoplasm as soon as 
the albumen has passed from the active to the inactive state.” This restricts 
the word protoplasm to the living state, and confirms the need of a specific 
name for the mass into which protoplasm is resolvable at death. The expres- 
sions active and inactive albumen are ambiguous, and the above author by no 
means states or implies that ‘‘inactive albumen” can again become ‘‘active”’ 
or living in any other way than as pabulum through other living matter. 
Sachs expresses the opinion of all physiologists who reject the mysterious vital 
principle, when he says that the matter of the organism must completely 
condition the form and that the protoplasm of the leaf, shoot, root and flower 
of a plant must be qualitatively and quantitatively as distinct as their morpho- 
logical organism, although he has no more than any one else been able to 
demonstrate chemically that difference. 
Berthold (Protoplasma meckanik, 1887) rejects the prominence given to 
albumen or any other single proteid or proximate principle, and agrees with 
Baumaun that we just as well say that water was the essential constituent ; 
for chemical analysis always shows extreme complexity in the proteids and 
other matters into which protoplasm is resolved after death, and the albumen 
of the laboratory shows no more properties of life than water itself. The con- 
stituents found in protoplasm, both elemental and proximate are no doubt 
combined into an essential whole, although as yet chemistry ‘‘has hardly 
lifted in a few places the veil which conceals from us the knowledge of that 
state” (p. 75). Besides, ‘‘doubtless not all organisms are alike in this 
respect, and many substances are necessary for one which can be done without 
by another, and the same holds good in the different stages of the same 
organism” (p. 75). F. Schwartz, in his Morphologische und Chemische 
Zusammensetzung des Protoplasmas, in Cohn’s Beitriége, 1887, says (p.8) that all 
chemical researches on protoplasm deal as yet only with it in its dead state, 
and that this is a defect to be regretted, but as yet without remedy, as far as he 
can see. Still it is progress when we can point out differences in the dead 
contents of different kinds of protoplasm, as we have a right to infer from these, 
differences in the living state. He states (p. 9) that in the cytoplasma only one 
protein stuff can be detected; in the chlorophyll bodies two; and in the nuclei 
five different such bodies are found. He infers, therefore, that the latter are 
more complex and highly organised than the former parts of the vegetable 
cell. These facts, and many more of the same nature which might be adduced, 
should be, I think, always borne in mind, for by the continual insistance by 
Dr. Beale on the apparent uniformity of all kinds of protoplasm while their 
properties are so different, a kind of support is tacitly insinuated for the 
hypothetical vital principle which he is endeavouring to bring back into 
Biology. 

