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For all these membranous tissues are innumerably thronged with bioplasts or plastide particles, not for the purposes of obedience to man's will, or of performing any autonomous function, but simply to supply the tissues with the necessary nutrient matter to make up for the constant waste that is going on in a healthy living organ.
The fact that Professor Beale has discovered that what he calls bioplasm and germinal points or bioplasts may take on a distinct and separate color from tissue, when subjected to a solution of carmine in ammonia, is no evidence that he has penetrated the adytum of this sacred temple of Life, wherein lies the "mystery of mysteries."
Cook thinks the bioplasts have already thrown the cells. But decidedly the most objectionable statement of Professor Beale, although one confidently re-affirmed by our "Boston Monday Lecturer," is that which makes bioplasm and bioplasts the only "living matter."
He may not have been dead five minutes, and Professor Beale's bioplasts might still be at work spinning matter and weaving tissue for the integrity of the displaced bone. Why will it not knit? Simply because the vital principle that differentiates matter is gone can no longer act.
Now, these germinal points, or bioplasts, in each of these myriads of cells, work, not separately and independently, like so many oysters in their respective shells, but harmoniously and together, as if under the supervisional direction of one supreme architect and builder.
Where, we repeat, are these bioplasts now? They are all quietly and industriously at work as before. The occupant of the song-mansion is gone, but not one of these bioplasts has dropped a clew, thrown down a shuttle, abandoned a loom, or fled in dismay to the core of its cell. They still pulsate, throb, throw off tissue.
Harvey we are all driven in the end, by those intuitive processes of reasoning which are hardly less conclusive than mathematical induction itself. We may call these "primordia viventium" plastide particles, bioplasts, vital units, or whatsoever we will, the name is nothing, the working process is everything.
The bioplastic spinners and weavers work as obediently for the one master-ego as the other. They never stop to inquire how far they shall differentiate this vital tissue or that, or in what direction even they shall work. Not a thread is spun nor a shuttle thrown that is not directed by the one head-webster of vital tissue. These obedient bioplasts determine nothing, direct nothing.
This mysterious transmutation of one thing into another, as organic matter into living organisms, is due to a vitally implanted principle, not to these little bioplasts, or mere epithelial and other tools with which the vital principle works.
The microscope may demonstrate that these little bioplasts throb have life; but there is no intelligent purpose manifested by them except as they are moved by an unseen hand that conclusively directs the whole structural work builds up the one complete symmetrical structure, not its thousand independent parts having no relation to a general plan.
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