Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 15.djvu/742

 manifestations, there is protoplasm; wherever there is protoplasm, there, too, is life. Thus, coextensive with the whole of organic nature—every vital act being referable to some mode or property of protoplasm—it becomes to the biologist what the ether is to the physicist; only that instead of being an hypothetical conception, accepted as a reality from its adequacy in the explanation of phenomena, it is a tangible and visible reality, which the chemist may analyze in his laboratory, the biologist scrutinize beneath his microscope and his dissecting needle.

The chemical composition of protoplasm is very complex, and has not been exactly determined. It may, however, be stated that protoplasm is essentially a combination of albuminoid bodies, and that its principal elements are, therefore, oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen. In its typical state it presents the condition of a semi-fluid substance—a tenacious, glairy liquid, with a consistence somewhat like that of the white of an unboiled egg While we watch it beneath the microscope, movements are set up in it: waves traverse its surface, or it may be seen to flow away in streams, either broad and attaining but a slight distance from the main mass, or else stretching away far from their source, as narrow liquid threads, which may continue simple, or may divide into branches, each following its own independent course; or the streams may flow one into the other, as streamlets would flow into rivulets and rivulets into rivers, and this not only where gravity would carry them, but in a direction diametrically opposed to gravitation: now we see it spreading itself out on all sides into a thin liquid stratum, and again drawing itself together within the narrow limits which had at first confined it, and all this without any obvious impulse from without which would send the ripples over its surface or set the streams flowing from its margin. Though it is certain that all these phenomena are in response to some stimulus exerted on it by the outer world, they are such as we never meet with in a simply physical fluid—they are spontaneous movements resulting from its proper irritability, from its essential constitution as living matter.

Examine it closer, bring to bear on it the highest powers of your microscope—you will probably find disseminated through it countless multitudes of exceedingly minute granules; but you may also find it absolutely homogeneous, and, whether containing granules or not, it is certain that you will find nothing to which the term organization