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Anatomists and histologists have more perfectly demonstrated the muscle fibers of the heart and the structure at and around the valves; the physiologic chemists have shown more clearly the action of drugs, metals and organic solutions on the heart; and the physiologists and clinicians with laboratory facilities have demonstrated by various new apparatus the action of the heart and the circulatory power under various conditions.
And so histologists came to question whether, after all, the cell contents rather than the enclosing wall must not be the really essential structure, and the weight of increasing observations finally left no escape from the conclusion that such is really the case.
Not the organs, so much as their constituent cells, say the histologists; not the cells, but their molecules, say in turn the chemists. We break the flux of sensible reality into things, then, at our will. We create the subjects of our true as well as of our false propositions. We create the predicates also.
Thus, histologists, embryogenists, and naturalists believe far less readily than physiologists in the physico-chemical character of vital actions. The fact is, neither one nor the other of these two theories, neither that which affirms nor that which denies the possibility of chemically producing an elementary organism, can claim the authority of experiment.
Perhaps it is now in spirits in a specimen jar, an example to all medical students of what to avoid in an appendix; perhaps it was stained and frozen, and microtomized into transparent sections as they do such things, and mounted on glass slips and distributed about the world for curious histologists to wreak their eyes upon. For a time you lay uneasily still and then woke up to pain.
Nor are histologists agreed as to whether the red-blood corpuscles themselves are to be regarded as true cells, or merely as fragments of cells budded out from a true cell for a special purpose; but in either case there is not the slightest doubt that the chief function of the red corpuscle is to carry oxygen.
In a word, it was shown that each central nerve cell, with its fibrillar offshoots, is an isolated entity. Instead of being in physical connection with a multitude of other nerve cells, it has no direct physical connection with any other nerve cell whatever. When Dr. Cajal announced his discovery, in 1889, his revolutionary claims not unnaturally amazed the mass of histologists.
On the contrary, those whose attention is concentrated on the minute structure of living tissues, on their genesis and evolution, histologists and embryogenists on the one hand, naturalists on the other, are interested in the retort itself, not merely in its contents. They find that this retort creates its own form through a unique series of acts that really constitute a history.
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