"Self-consciousness is a living ellipse:"1 and Man is merely an automaton, though "a conscious automaton ;" an 66 automaton endowed with free will: " 2. Had Horace heard all this, he would have had something more to say about this snail-like "mind, slumbering deeply;" and would have used a much stronger word than "quandoque." 1 Oken. 2 Prof. Huxley, in The Fortnightly Review, November, 1874, p. 577. H “I bid you beware that, in accepting these conclusions, you are placing your feet on the first rung of a ladder which, in most people's estimation, is the reverse of Jacob's, and leads to the antipodes of heaven.”—Prof. Huxley. "A dangerous and degrading speculation."-Sir David Brewster. CHAPTER VII. PROTOPLASM. THE word "protoplasm" was invented in the year 1846, by the eminent German botanist Von Mohl, as a name for one portion of those nitrogenous contents of the cells of living plants, the close chemical resemblance of which to the essential constituents of living animals had been in that same year, emphatically pointed out by the botanist Payen. But if, pushing our investigation beyond the origin of the name, we inquire as to the nature of the thing, and ask What is Protoplasm? the answer to that question involves a reference to the historical progress of the physiological cell theory. That theory may be said to have wholly grown up since Dr. John Hunter wrote his celebrated work "On the Nature of the Blood." According to Dr. Hunter, new growths depended on an exudation of the plasma of the blood, in which, by virtue of its own plasticity, ΙΟΙ |