Page:Cellular pathology as based upon physiological and pathological histology.djvu/36

30 individual processes of life. But I think that we must look upon this as certain, that, however much of the more delicate interchange of matter, which takes place within a cell, may not concern the material structure as a whole, yet the real action does proceed from the structure as such, and that the living element only maintains its activity as long as it really presents itself to us as an independent whole.

In this question it is of primary importance (and you will excuse my dwelling a little upon this point, as it is one which is still a matter of dispute) that we should determine what is really to be understood by the term cell. Quite at the beginning of the latest phase of histological development, great difficulties sprang up in crowds with regard to this matter. Schwann, as you no doubt recollect, following immediately in the footsteps of Schleiden, interpreted his observations according to botanical standards, so that all the doctrines of vegetable physiology were invoked, in a greater or less degree, to decide questions relating to the physiology of animal bodies. Vegetable cells, however, in the light in which they were at that time universally, and as they are even now also frequently regarded, are structures, whose identity with what we call animal cells cannot be admitted without reserve.

When we speak of ordinary vegetable cellular tissue, we generally understand thereby a tissue, which, in its most simple and regular form is, in a transverse section, seen to be composed of nothing but four- or six-sided, or, if somewhat looser in texture, of roundish or polygonal bodies, in which a tolerably thick, tough wall (membrane) is always to be distinguished. If now a single one of these bodies be isolated, a cavity is found enclosed by this tough, angular, or round wall, in the interior of which very different substances, varying ac-