A Criticism of the Cell-Theory; being an Answer to Mr. Sedgwick's ...

A CRITICISM OP THE CELL-THEORY. 155
Although in this passage, which is descriptive of Thallophytes,
Goebel attaches too much importance, as I think, to the continuity
of a vesicle as determining the unicellularity of a plant,
he shows clearly enough that he regards the growth and mode
of extension of the protoplasm, not its division into cells, as
the feature of fundamental importance.
There is the further property in plants that continuity
between the cells of highly organised multicellular plants has
been shown to be of very general, if not universal, occurrence.
And if complete separation were to be insisted upon as a
characteristic of a cell, any given Angiosperm, or other highly
organised plant, could no longer be considered as an aggregate
of life units, but rather as a conjunct mass of protoplasm,
imperfectly broken up into corpuscles, in each of which there
is a nucleus. It is but a step from the much-branched, multinucleate
Coeloblastse, which have no partitions, to the forma,
tion of incomplete partitions, breaking up the protoplasm into
small masses, which remain, however, linked with one another,
and so preserve an original continuity similar to that of the
Coeloblastse, which has only apparently but never actually been
broken.
So much has this idea impressed itself on the minds of some
observers, that Hofmeister suggested that the creeping motion
of the plasmodia of the Myxomycetes and their later transfer,
mation into fructification, is representative of the simplest type
of growth, even for more highly organised plants. This
opinion has been quoted with approval by von Sachs, who,
before even the continuity of the protoplasm of plant cells
was established, wrote that " fundamentally every plant, how-*
ever highly organised, is a protoplasmic body, coherent in
itself, which, clothed without by a cell-wall and traversed
internally by innumerable partitions, grows; and it appears
that the more vigorously this formation of chambers and
walls proceeds with the nutrition of the protoplasm, the higher
also is the development attained by the total organisation."
Expressed in this way, the phenomenon of cell-formation is
represented to us as being nothing more than a particular