Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 8.djvu/81

Rh the past twenty years, through the more exact information obtained in regard to the lowest kinds of organisms. Yet the idea had been grasped more than half a century ago; for the "primordial slime" which Lorenz Oken proclaimed in 1809 to be the original source of life, and the material basis of all living bodies, possessed in all essentials the same qualities and the same importance now ascribed to protoplasm; and the sarcode so called, which in 1835 was pointed out by the French zoölogist Félix Dujardin as the only living substance in the body of rhizopods and other inferior primitive animals, is identical with protoplasm. But when Schleiden and Schwann, in 1838, developed their cell theory, they were not acquainted with the fundamental significance of protoplasm. Even Hugo Mohl, who in 1846 was the first to apply the name protoplasm to the peculiar serous and mobile substance in the interior of vegetable cells, and who perceived its high importance, was very far from understanding its significance in relation to all organisms. Not until Ferdinand Cohn (1850), and more fully Franz Unger (1855), had established the identity of the animate and contractile protoplasm in vegetable cells and the sarcode of the lower animals, could Max Schultze in 1858-'61 elaborate this protoplasm theory of the sarcode, so as to proclaim protoplasm to be the most essential and important constituent of all organic cells, and to show that the bag or husk of the cell, the cellular membrane, and the intercellular substances, are but secondary parts of the cell, and are frequently wanting. In a similar manner Lionel Beale (1862) distinguished such primary forming and secondary formed substances in all organic tissues, and gave to protoplasm, including the cellular germ, the name of "germinal matter," and to all the other substances entering into the composition of tissues, being secondary and produced, the name of "formed matter."

The protoplasm theory received a wide and thorough illustration from the study of rhizopods which Ernst Haeckel published in 1862 in his "Monographie der Radiolarien," and its complete application in the "Generelle Morphologie der Organismen" by the same naturalist. Haeckel distinguishes in these works, for the first time, between germless protoplasm, consisting only of plastids called cytods by him, and the germ-containing real cells, the elementary organism of which consists already of two different essential parts, germ and protoplasm. He conceived the cytods and cells as two different gradations of plastids, of organic elementary individuals, or as "individuals of the first order," and adopted entirely, in regard to the individual independence of the plastids, the ideas which had been set forth by Rudolf Virchow and Ernst Brücke.

Virchow, whose "Cellular-Pathologie" contains the most complete application of the cell theory to pathology, called the cells and the "cell territories" belonging to them the individual hearth or source of life; Brücke designated them as "elementary organisms." The