Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 8.djvu/82

72 or individuals of the first order, identical with them, were determined by Haeckel phylogenetically, to the effect that cytods and cells must be distinguished as two essentially different orders of formation; i, e., that cells were phylogenetically produced in a secondary manner from homogeneous cytods by means of the secretion of a germ by the protoplasm. This distinction is important for the reason that many of the lowest orders of organisms have no germ in the protoplasm; such is the case especially with the moners. These simplest of organisms were first discovered by Haeckel in 1864, and described by him in 1868 in his "Monographie der Moneren." Cienkowski and Huxley also made valuable investigations of various moners. The latter discovered in 1868 the famous bathybius, a very remarkable kind of moner, which at immense depths covers the bottom of the sea in immeasurable numbers, and which consists of formless and variable protoplasm tissues of different sizes.

Among the moners investigated by Cienkowski, the most interesting are the vampire-cells, which are formless little bodies of protoplasm that bore into vegetable cells by means of their pointed pseudopodia, kill them, and absorb the protoplasm they find in them. On the basis of these discoveries Haeckel elaborated his plastid theory and carbon theory, which give the extremest philosophical consequences of the protoplasm theory.

In England the monistic philosophy of protoplasm has received the most weighty support from Huxley, whose "Protoplasm, or the Physical Basis of Life" (1868), put it in its true light, and called forth numerous writings for and against it. One of the most recent treatises in favor of it is that of James Ross "On Protoplasm" (1874). Probably the name of plasson will be given to the primordial, perfectly structureless, and homogeneous protoplasm of the moners and other cytods, in contradistinction to the protoplasm of germ-containing cells, which are produced only subsequently, by the differentiation of an internal nucleus and external protoplasm by the plasson bodies of moners. Édouard van Beneden especially calls for this distinction in his "Recherches sur l'évolution des grégarines;" and Haeckel has adduced new facts in favor of it in his "Monograpphie der Kalkschwämme." For the theory of "primordial generation," the spontaneous generation of the first vitality on earth, the distinction is of special importance, as the first organisms thus produced could have been only structureless specks of plasson, like the bathybius and other moners. The great theoretical difficulties formerly in the way of the theory of primordial or spontaneous generation have been removed by the discovery of the moners and the establishment of the plastid theory. As the protoplasm of the bathybius is not yet as much as individualized, while in the case of other moners there are individual lumps of constant sizes, it follows that the moners are to be regarded as the natural bodies which effect the transition from inorganic to organic Nature.