flesh display. The roots of all plants are able to direct their growth towards the moist places in the soil. The sundew plant is a trap to catch insects. Any other small object put against the tentacles of the leaf will be enclosed, but a little later it will be released. A fly placed in possible reach of the leaf will cause a motion towards the insect to secure it.

The cynips punctures a leaf tissue. The wound it produces is no more than a pin point would make, and the leaf would heal without a scar. But the leaf becomes malformed, and its whole texture is taken to build a gall-ball, which is both house and food for the grub. A new idea entered with the parasite egg, and carried out the cynips' type.

Some seeds, such as the cherry, blackberry, and raspberry, are surrounded by a pulpy, luscious fruit, which the birds eat, and the stones of the fruit pass through the bodies of the birds and are scattered far and wide.

Other seeds are supplied with fluffy tufts of cotton, and by that device are blown afield and spread for new germinations. Others are held by bushy tops which break before the seed pods do and go tumbling over the ground to new

places for the seed growth. Others are protected by hard casements which may be carried by floods to great distances. Others are provided with arrangements by which they fasten themselves to passing bodies, and are thus disseminated.

Protective resemblance is psychic. The regular stinging nettle is self-protective. The white nettle is regularly shunned because it is so near like the other. On the Riviera grows a species of euphorbia so acrid that its juices protect it from many enemies. The yellow bugle which grows in the same region escapes by protective resemblance.

"A tree is a thought, a unity, a rational, responsible whole; the matter of it is but the medium of expression. Call it matter, tree, or a physical production, and have we yet touched its ultimate reality? Are we quite sure that what we call a physical world is, after all, a physical world? The preponderating view of science now is, that it is not. The very term material world, we are told, is a misnomer, and that the world is a spiritual world merely employing matter for its manifestations." (Drummond.)

The Cell.

CHAPTER V.

THE FOUNTAINS OF LIFE.

THE working basis of the life sciences is the cell. All life might have been derived from a single cell. Nature's prodigalities with its myriad forms of utility and beauty have come up from plasm germs which are absolutely indistinguishable. Cell life, chemically and physiologically considered, is identical in organisms of widely differing structure. With such a homogeneous base, and with similar outer conditions, diverse structure must have some other accounting than the straight action of the organic chemistries. We have to deal surely with some other unit of force, some difference of life potential which does not show itself phenomenally at first, but in the outcome of things. Would the basal stuff begin a cleavage unless the differential was there to induce it? Are we not compelled to have an explanation of what comes to pass in the production of definite organisms. Mere cell division is

mechanical. That is, it is a straight measure of the increase of life; but in order to account for what is, it must get itself mixed up with a lot of headlong potencies which the laboratory does not disclose. In other words, if, in the first stages, it is practically impossible to distinguish the animal cell from the man cell, and even if the fact shows that life is continuous, does not the unfolding life of each cell in its own way, and in its own direction, go to show conclusively that the organic chemistries are not yet masters of all the forces actually at work in embryology?

The most painstaking empirical tests are not able to set forth that which is a fact about these embryos. There is an animal cell. There is a man cell. In each case this will be so before we have the means to know it, except by knowing their procreative sources. The fertilized ovary, by all physical tests, is identical in material and structure with hundreds of thousands of cells about it. But the fact is, from the moment of impregnation a masterful somewhat, which eludes all analysis, instantly demands a word picture of that which is to come about in the swift evaluations of life. And when a start has been made toward a definite organization, there are no devia

tions, no confusions, no scarred edges through border contacts, no careless throw of the shuttles in the loom of life.

Individuality of the Cell.

The tendency among students in embryology now is to take large account of the individuality of the cell. The cell has a degree of independency of life over the molecular aggregates to which it may belong. There may be living cells in a body after life has become extinct. Leucocytes may be taken from their living home, and kept for days, in a citrate chloride solution. The heart of a tortoise has been taken from the body and kept alive for weeks by supplying it with artificial blood, made of salts and grape sugar. The cell, therefore, has a distinct life focal of more or less tenacity. To a degree, it is independent of the overlap of the complex life unit to which it may belong.

Goeble makes a statement of Negeli's idea of cell investment as follows: "There are also in the nature of plants themselves intimations of laws of variation which lead to a perfecting of organic forms, and to their progressive differentiation independently of their struggle for existence,