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No chemical change has yet intervened to break down their cell-walls, or interfere with the occupations assigned them. The machinery that ran their looms is stopped that is all. The invisible shuttles have ceased to ply the meshes of their tangled webs are broken the more delicate threads of song are snapped in sunder, but the bioplastic spinners and weavers are all there.
But it is admitted that the nerve fibres constitute an uninterrupted network which admits of no endings that is, whose ultimate reticulations lie beyond the microscopic limit. But there is a cell in every hundredth part of an inch of these ultimate reticulations, in each of which one of these bioplastic weavers sits plying his threads into the warp and woof of nerve tissue, if not of nerve force.
It is this vital principle manifesting itself in all living organisms, not from them; directing Professor Beale's "bioplastic weavers," not directed by them; availing itself of necessary plasmic conditions, if not giving rise to them in the first instance; observing no developmental processes by which one form of life laps over upon another, and following no order but that of universal harmony in the Divine intendment.
But in every living organism, from the lowest and simplest to the highest and most complex, all bioplastic spinners of filamentous tissue, all plastide weavers of membranous or spun matter, all epithelial bobbin-runners, and other anatomical helpers and workers, perform their respective tasks under the special supervision we have named, that is, under the higher unit of life.
The occupant of this dog-mansion has dismissed one set of bioplastic weavers after another; has thrown aside this spun tissue and that warp and woof of woven texture, time and time again, so that the dog of to-day is not the same physical dog of a year ago; and yet he has the same affection for his master, carries with him the same scar received twenty years before in the chase, gives the same glad bark of welcome as his owner nears home, exhibits the same characteristic wag in his tail, and, lying down to sleep, dreams of the once happy chase in which he is no longer able to engage.
Let him come out then, as the ablest vitalist now living, and boldly assert the presence of the man-unit and the dog-unit, instead of falling back on his bioplastic spinners and weavers of tissue, which are only the servants and willing workers of the one integral unit, or life-directing force, within.
Those who attempt to bisect this vital unit, divide it up into one fractional part after another, until it shall represent a million bioplastic workers in as many different cells, are committing the same sort of folly in principle at least, if not in practice as that which led the simple-minded daughters of Pelias to cut up their father, in the expectation of boiling the old bioplasts into new, and then, by the cunning aid of Medea, who directed the operation, reuniting them into the one Peliastic-unit they so much delighted to honor.
What if, in one direction, we should find those inconceivably small specks, or mere bioplastic points, which we call "living matter," or, in the other direction, those inconceivably vast world-forming masses which we call "dead matter," who shall say that "the secret places of the Most High" are not hidden from us, or that when the spirit of God first moved through these vast fissures and chasms in the heavens upon the face of all matter, there was not imparted to it that "animating principle of life" of which the biblical genesis speaks, and which we everywhere see manifesting itself in nature?
Each works in his own cell as obediently as a galley-slave. All specific modifications, all determinate movements, all molecular arrangements, all multiplications of bioplastic force, are the work of the one vital webster, or principle of life, within that which shapes all, directs all, determines all.
The icy hand of decay and death will soon be upon them these poor bioplastic weavers of tissue but the vocal spark, the "bright gem instinct with music," is beyond the reach of these dusky messengers. Where it is, not man, but the Giver of all life knows. We only know, when our faith is uplifted by inspiration, that
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