Page:Microscopicial researchers - Theodor Schwann - English Translation - 1947.pdf/191

GENERAL RETROSPECT. 165 fundamental principle of development. It was, in fact, shown that the elementary parts of most tissues, when traced backwards from their state of complete development to their primary condition are only developments of cells, which so far as our observations, still incomplete, extend, seemed to be formed in a similar manner to the cells compared in the first section. As might be expected, according to this principle the cells, in their earliest stage, were almost always furnished. with the characteristic nuclei, in some the pre-existence of this nucleus, and the formation of the cell around it was proved, and it was then that the cells began to undergo the various modifications, from which the diverse forms of the elementary parts of animals resulted. Thus the apparent difference in the mode of development of muscular fibres and blood-corpuscles, the former originating by the arrangement of globules in rows, the latter by the formation of a vesicle around a globule, was reconciled in the fact that muscular fibres are not elementary parts co-ordinate with blood-corpuscles, but that the globules composing muscular fibres at first correspond to the blood-corpuscles, and are like them, vesicles or cells, containing the characteristic cell-nucleus, which, like the nucleus of the blood-corpuscles, is probably formed before the cell. The elementary parts of all tissues are formed of cells in an analogous, though very diversified manner, so that it may be asserted, that there is one universal principle of development for the elementary parts of organisms, however different, and that this principle is the formation of cells. This is the chief result of the foregoing observations.

The same process of development and transformation of cells within a structureless substance is repeated in the formation of all the organs of an organism, as well as in the formation of new organisms; and the fundamental phenomenon attending the exertion of productive power in organic nature is accordingly as follows: a structureless substance is pre- sent in the first instance, which lies either around or in the interior of cells already existing; and cells are formed in it in accordance with certain laws, which cells become developed in various ways into the elementary parts of organisms.

The development of the proposition, that there exists one gene-