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Will they not read us and smile over us as curious mixtures of truth and error valuable as showing the state of science in our day? Do you dream of solving the mystery of life? Of bridging the chasm between the crystal and the non-nucleated cell? I do not.
Under these circumstances it may well be asked, how is one mass of non-nucleated protoplasm to be distinguished from another? why call one "plant" and the other "animal"? The only reply is that, so far as form is concerned, plants and animals are not separable, and that, in many cases, it is a mere matter of convention whether we call a given organism an animal or a plant.
If old, a cinnabar-red streak is seen on drawing a needle across the stain. The human blood-corpuscle is a non-nucleated, biconcave disc, having a diameter of about 1/3500 of an inch. All mammalian red corpuscles have the same shape, except those of the camel, which are oval. The corpuscles of birds, fishes, reptiles, and amphibians, are oval and nucleated.
Under these circumstances it may well be asked, how is one mass of non-nucleated protoplasm to be distinguished from another? why call one "plant" and the other "animal"? The only reply is that, so far as form is concerned, plants and animals are not separable, and that, in many cases, it is a mere matter of convention whether we call a given organism an animal or a plant.
Under these circumstances it may well be asked, how is one mass of non-nucleated protoplasm to be distinguished from another? why call one "plant" and the other "animal"? The only reply is that, so far as form is concerned, plants and animals are not separable, and that, in many cases, it is a mere matter of convention whether we call a given organism an animal or a plant.
Haeckel’s demonstration of the possibility of spontaneous generation is along these lines. He refers to the cytodes, the blood corpuscles, to alleged or actual non-nucleated cells, to bacteria, to the simplest forms of cell-structure, as proofs of the possibility of a descending series of connecting-links. Unfortunately, this primitive slime soon proved itself an illusion.
And it is not doubted that, if the conditions of the universe brought about a natural combination of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and oxygen in certain proportions, so that proteid resulted, the transition to proteid which forms itself and renews itself from the surrounding elements, to assimilating, growing, dividing proteid, and ultimately to the most primitive plasmic structure, to non-nucleated, nucleated, and finally fully formed cells, could also come about.
This, of course, does not prove that the nuclei or their chromosomes do not determine the characters of the parts of the embryo developed, but they show that the parts of the non-nucleated cytoplasm correspond to particular parts of the embryo. The most important object of investigation at the present time is to find the origin of these properties of the chromosomes.
Under these circumstances it may well be asked, how is one mass of non-nucleated protoplasm to be distinguished from another? why call one "plant" and the other "animal"? The only reply is that, so far as form is concerned, plants and animals are not separable, and that, in many cases, it is a mere matter of convention whether we call a given organism an animal or a plant.
Petersburg, in his essay, “Protoplasm and Vital Force.” He sharply castigates the one-sidedness and impetuosity of the mechanical theory, as in Haeckel’s discovery of Bathybius and of non-nucleated bacteria. The latter are problematical, and the former has been proved an illusion. To penetrate farther into the processes of life is simply to become aware of an ever-deepening series of riddles.
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