Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 58.djvu/43

Rh in 1858, Lord Lister demonstrated that the pigment granules moved in the cell plasma, by forces resident within the cell itself, acting under the influence of an external stimulant, and not by a contractility of the wall. Under some conditions the pigment was attracted to the center of the cell, when the skin became pale; under other conditions the pigment was diffused throughout the body and the branches of the cell, and gave to the skin a dark color. It was also experimentally shown that a potent influence over these movements was exercised by the nervous system.

The study of the cells of glands engaged in secretion, even when the secretion is colorless, and the comparison of their appearance when secretion is going on with that seen when the cells are at rest, have shown that the cell plasm is much more granular and opaque, and contains larger particles during activity than when the cell is passive; the body of the cell swells out from an increase in the contents of its plasm, and chemical changes accompany the act of secretion. Ample evidence, therefore, is at hand to support the position taken by John Goodsir, nearly sixty years ago, that secretions are formed within the cells, and lie in that part of the cell which we now say consists of the cell plasm; that each secreting cell is endowed with its own peculiar property, according to the organ in which it is situated, so that bile is formed by the cells in the liver, milk by those in the mamma, and so on.

Intimately associated with the process of secretion is that of nutrition. As the cell plasm lies at the periphery of a cell, and as it is, alike both in secretion and nutrition, brought into closest relation with the surrounding medium, from which the pabulum is derived, it is necessarily associated with nutritive activity. Its position enables it to absorb nutritive material directly from without, and in the process of growth it increases in amount by interstitial changes and additions throughout its substance, and not by mere accretions on its surface.

Hitherto I have spoken of a cell as a unit, independent of its neighbors as regards its nutrition and the other functions which it has to discharge. The question has, however, been discussed, whether in a tissue composed of cells closely packed together cell plasm may not give origin to processes or threads which are in contact or continuous with corresponding processes of adjoining cells, and that cells may therefore, to some extent, lose their individuality in the colony of which they are members. Appearances were recognized between 1863 and 1870 by Schrön and others in the deeper cells of the epidermis and of some mucous membranes which gave sanction to this view, and it seems possible, through contact or continuity of threads connecting a cell with its neighbors, that cells may exercise a direct influence on each other.

Nägeli, the botanist, as the foundation of a mechanico-physiological theory of descent, considered that in plants a network of cell plasm.