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It is this vital unit that assimilates or aggregates protoplasmic matter into the morphological cell, or the initial organism in a vital structure, or an approach towards structural form. Morphological cells are not therefore "units," considered as the least of any given whole, nor are they mere structureless matter, or any more homogeneous in character than in substance.
In the lowest Protozoa, as some of the Rhizopods, we have a homogeneity approaching to that of air, water, or earth; and the ascent to organisms of greater and greater complexity of structure, is an ascent to organisms which are in that respect more strongly contrasted with the relatively structureless masses in the environment. In form again we see the same truth.
But just as in language certain diphthongs and syllables are frequently recurring, so we have in the body certain secondary and tertiary combinations, which we meet more frequently than the solitary elements of which they are composed. Thus A B, or a collection of cells united by simple structureless solid, is seen to be extensively employed in the body under the name of cartilage.
The fertilized egg of any animal consists of a single cell, a little mass of protoplasm containing a nucleus and surrounded by a structureless membrane. The egg is globular. The nucleus undergoes certain very peculiar, still but little understood, changes and divides into two. The protoplasm also soon divides into two masses clustering each around its own nucleus.
Everywhere it greets us with a passionate preference; not flowers but leaves of grass, not music but drum-taps, not composition but aggregation, not the hero but the average man, not the crisis but the vulgarest moment; and by this resolute marshalling of nullities, by this effort to show us everything as a momentary pulsation of a liquid and structureless whole, he profoundly stirs the imagination.
Indefinite and structureless in the simplest of these forms, as instance again the Gregarina, the limiting membrane becomes, in higher Infusoria, definite and often complex: showing that the selection of favourable variations has had largely to do with its formation.
One of the profoundest of living English philosophers, who is at the same time the most thoroughgoing and consistent of the champions of astynomocracy, has devoted a very able and ingenious essay to the drawing out of a comparison between the process by which men have advanced from the savage state to the highest civilization, and that by which an animal passes from the condition of an almost shapeless and structureless germ, to that in which it exhibits a highly complicated structure and a corresponding diversity of powers.
Besides, the Bible Genesis answers to the logical necessity of predicating a determinate cause for each and every vital effect, or each living organism apparently springing from plasmic conditions or mere structureless matter.
That a microscopic portion of seemingly structureless matter should embody an influence of such kind, that the resulting man will in fifty years after become gouty or insane, is a truth which would be incredible were it not daily illustrated.
We conclude, therefore, that the small, apparently structureless, impregnate ovum from which we have each one of us sprung, has a potential recollection of all that has happened to each one of its ancestors prior to the period at which any such ancestor has issued from the bodies of its progenitors provided, that is to say, a sufficiently deep, or sufficiently often-repeated, impression has been made to admit of its being remembered at all.
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