Page:Cellular pathology as based upon physiological and pathological histology.djvu/60

54: LECTURE II. a fluid, but that, under certain circumstances, they gathered together, not in the form of vesicular membranes, but so as to constitute a compact heap, a globe (mass, cluster—Klumpchen), and that this globe was the starting point of all further development, a membrane being formed outside and a nucleus inside, by the differentiation of the mass, by apposition, or intussusception.

At the present time, neither fibres, nor globules, nor elementary granules, can be looked upon as histological starting-points. As long as living elements were conceived to be produced out of parts previously destitute of shape, such as formative fluids, or matters {plastic matter, blastema, cytoblastema), any one of the above views could of course be entertained, but it is in this very particular that the revolution which the last few years have brought with them has been the most marked. Even in pathology we can now go so far as to establish, as a general principle, that no development of any kind begins de novo, and consequently as to reject the theory of equivocal [spontaneous] generation just as much in the history of the development of individual parts as we do in that of entire organisms. Just as little as we can now admit that a taenia can arise out of saburral mucus, or that out of the residue of the decomposition of animal or vegetable matter an infusorial animalcule, a fungus, or an alga, can be formed, equally little are we disposed to concede either in physiological or pathological histology, that a new cell can build itself up out of any non-cellular substance. Where a cell arises, there a cell must have previously existed (omnis cellula e cellula), just as an animal can spring only from an animal, a plant only from a plant. In this manner, although there

granules. 6. Heap of granules (cluster), c. Granule-cell, with membrane and nucleus.