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Updated: May 3, 2025
On this the question arises, "Which are the most living parts?" The answer to this was given a few years ago with a flourish of trumpets, and our biologists shouted with one voice, "Great is protoplasm. There is no life but protoplasm, and Huxley is its prophet." Read Huxley's "Physical Basis of Mind."
Our leading biologists had staked so heavily upon natural selection from among fortuitous variations that they would have been more than human if they had not caught at everything that seemed to give it colour and support. It was while this mechanical fit was upon them, and in the closest connection with it, that the protoplasm boom developed.
At the top was protoplasm, and each year saw our chemists nearer the top of the ladder, and thus approaching protoplasm as their final goal. They now began to predict that only a few more years would be required for chemists to discover the proper conditions, and thus make protoplasm.
This particular kind of protoplasm, which is called "chlorophyll," will have nothing to do with the green waves and throws them back, so that every little grain of this protoplasm looks green and gives the leaf its green colour. It is these little green cells that by the help of the sun-waves digest the food of the plant and turn the water and gases into useful sap and juices.
It is safe to say that the early life of the world formed in the oceans of the time. So absolutely is the habit fixed upon cells of protoplasm that even to-day the activities of the cells of higher animals depend upon the presence of moisture. The cells of our own bodies are to-day living, as it were, in an ocean.
"Protoplasm" is a question of history, so far as it is a name; of fact, so far as it is a thing. Dr. Stirling, has not taken the trouble to refer to the original authorities for his history, which is consequently a travesty; and still less has he concerned himself with looking at the facts, but contents himself with taking them also at second-hand.
They may not all be of the same size; but they are all composed of protoplasm, and the protoplasm of plants cannot be distinguished from that of animals by any physical or chemical tests known to modern science. The protoplasm in the brain of a bird is the same as that in its toes; and no metaphysical subtilties about heredity have ever explained why the one does a different work from the other.
In Schäfer's philosophy evolution is purely a mechanical process there is no inborn tendency, no inherent push, no organizing effort, but all results from the blind groping and chance jostling of the inorganic elements; from the molecules of undifferentiated protoplasm to the brain of a Christ or a Plato, is just one series of unintelligent physical and chemical activities in matter.
They gain an entrance through the lungs, food canal, or skin, and, living upon the fluids and tissues, multiply with great rapidity until they permeate the entire body. Not only do they destroy the protoplasm, but they form waste products, called toxins, which act as poisons. Diseases caused by germs are known as infectious, or contagious, diseases.
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.
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