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Updated: May 3, 2025
The membrane of cellulose, in which the protoplasm wraps itself up, not only prevents the simplest vegetable organism from moving, but screens it also, in some measure, from those outer stimuli which act on the sensibility of the animal as irritants and prevent it from going to sleep. The plant is therefore unconscious. Here again, however, we must beware of radical distinctions.
I hope you like the society of this poor devil whom your damned tracts and hymns and priests have driven out of his wits. Five men in this place, they tell me, five men in this place who might have been fathers of families, and every one of them thinks he is God the Father. Oh! you may talk about the ugliness of science, but there is no one here who thinks he is Protoplasm."
Under whatever disguise it takes refuge, whether fungus or oak, worm or man, the living protoplasm not only ultimately dies and is resolved into its mineral and lifeless constituents, but is always dying, and, strange as the paradox may sound, could not live unless it died.
Would it be fog or light that would envelop the history of man if we say that the existence of man was explained by the hypothesis of his gradual evolution from a primitive anthropomorphous form? Especially let him mistrust those who are holding forth about protoplasm, and maintaining that this is the only living substance.
She saw neither the beauty nor the significance of those grimy warehouses thrusting up along the muddy river amid the steam and the smoke caverns that concealed hardware, tools, groceries, lumber, all the raw protoplasm of life. An artist remarked once to Milly, "It's like Hell and like Paradise, all in one, this river!" She thought him rather silly.
Thus, the animal can only raise the complex substance of dead protoplasm to the higher power, as one may say, of living protoplasm; while the plant can raise the less complex substances carbonic acid, water, and nitrogenous salts to the same stage of living protoplasm, if not to the same level. But the plant also has its limitations.
The cause of these currents seems to lie in contractions of the protoplasm which bounds the channels in which they flow, but which are so minute that the best microscopes show only their effects, and not themselves.
In these higher animals this protoplasm is known as germplasm, that in body cells as somatoplasm. All that is really meant by "immortality" in a germplasm is continuity. That is, while an individual may consist of a colony of millions of cells, all of these spring from one cell and it a germ cell the fertilized ovum.
Under whatever disguise it takes refuge, whether fungus or oak, worm or man, the living protoplasm not only ultimately dies and is resolved into its mineral and lifeless constituents, but is always dying, and, strange as the paradox may sound, could not live unless it died.
Why is it that the oxidation of starch in the living machine gives rise to motion, growth, and reproduction, while if the oxidation occurs in the chemist's laboratory, or even in a bit of dead protoplasm, it simply gives rise to heat? One of the primary questions to demand attention in this search is whether we are to find the explanation, at the bottom, a chemical or a mechanical one.
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