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But gradually the researches of such accurate observers as Unger, Nageli, Kolliker, Reichart, and Remak tended to confirm the opinion of Von Mohl that cells spring only from cells, and finally Rudolf Virchow brought the matter to demonstration about 1860. His Omnis cellula e cellula became from that time one of the accepted data of physiology.

In the higher animals these changes are extremely complicated; but, within the last half century, the labours of such men as Von Baer, Rathke, Reichert, Bischof, and Remak, have almost completely unravelled them, so that the successive stages of development which are exhibited by a Dog, for example, are now as well known to the embryologist as are the steps of the metamorphosis of the silkworm moth to the school-boy.

The closer the observation the more striking seemed this similarity; and finally, about 1860, it was demonstrated by Heinrich de Bary and by Max Schultze that the two are to all intents and purposes identical. Even earlier Remak had reached a similar conclusion, and applied Von Mohl's word protoplasm to animal cell contents, and now this application soon became universal.

But Wolff had no immediate successors. The school of Cuvier was lamentably deficient in embryologists; and it was only in the course of the first thirty years of the present century, that Prevost and Dumas in France, and, later on, Doellinger, Pander, Von Baer, Rathke, and Remak in Germany, founded modern embryology; while, at the same time, they proved the utter incompatibility of the hypothesis of evolution, as formulated by Bonnet and Haller, with easily demonstrable facts.

In the higher animals these changes are extremely complicated; but, within the last half century, the labours of such men as Von Baer, Rathke, Reichert, Bischoff, and Remak, have almost completely unravelled them, so that the successive stages of development which are exhibited by a Dog, for example, are now as well known to the embryologist as are the steps of the metamorphosis of the silkworm moth to the school-boy.

Such a fibril may have about it a protective covering, which is known as the sheath of Schwann; but the fibril itself is the essential nerve tract; and in many cases, as Remak presently discovered, the sheath is dispensed with, particularly in case of the nerves of the so-called sympathetic system.

Remak did, indeed, manage to discover that the brain tissue is cellular, as early as 1833, and Ehrenberg in the same year saw that it is also fibrillar, but beyond this no great advance was made until 1858, when a sudden impulse was received from a new process introduced by Gerlach.

A troop of observers soon entered upon the study of the nerves, and the leader here, as in so many other lines of microscopical research, was no other than Theodor Schwann. Through his efforts, and with the invaluable aid of such other workers as Remak, Purkinje, Henle, Muller, and the rest, all the mystery as to the general characteristics of nerve tracts was cleared away.

The decade that followed that discovery was a time of great activity in the study of microscopic organisms and microscopic tissues, and such men as Ehrenberg and Henle and Bory Saint-Vincent and Kolliker and Rokitansky and Remak and Dujardin were widening the bounds of knowledge of this new subject with details that cannot be more than referred to here.