Half Hours With Modern Scientists: Lectures and Essays

by Thomas Henry Huxley; George F. Barker; E. D. Cope; James Hutchison Stirling; John Tyndall

Kinder zeugen, und die nähren so gut es vermag.

Weiter bringt es kein Mensch, stell’ er sich wie er auch will.”

That means, quite literally translated, “Why do the folks bustle and bawl? They want to feed themselves, get children, and then feed them as best they can; no man does more, let him do as he may.” This, really, is Mr. Huxley’s sole proof for his classification of the powers of man. Is it sufficient? Does it not apply rather to the birds of the air, the fish of the sea, and the beasts of the field, than to man? Did Newton only feed himself, beget children, and then feed them? Was it impossible for him to do any more, let him do as he might? And what we ask of Newton we may ask of all the rest. To elevate, therefore, the passing whim of mere literary Laune into a cosmical axiom and a proof in place—this we cannot help adding to the other productions here in which Mr. Huxley appears against himself.

But were it impossible either for him or us to point to these lacunæ, it would still be our right and our duty to refer to the present conditions of microscopic science in general as well as in particular, and to demur to the erection of its dicta, constituted as they yet are, into established columns and buttresses in support of any theory of life, material or other.

The most delicate and dubious of all the sciences, it is also the youngest. In its manipulations the slightest change may operate as a destructive drought, or an equally destructive deluge. Its very tools may positively create the structure it actually examines. The present state of the science, and what warrant it gives Mr. Huxley to dogmatize on protoplasm, we may understand from this avowal of Kühne’s: “To-day we believe that we see” such or such fact, “but know not that further improvements in the means of observation will not reveal what is assumed for certainty to be only illusion.” With such authority to lean on—and it is the highest we can have—we may be allowed to entertain the conjecture, that it is just possible that some certainties, even of Mr. Huxley, may yet reveal themselves as illusions.

But, in resistance to any sweeping conclusions built on it, we are not confined to a reference to the imperfections involved in the very nature and epoch of the science itself in general. With yet greater assurance of carrying conviction with us, we may point in particular to the actual opinions of its present professors. We have seen already, in the consideration premised, that Mr. Huxley’s hypothesis of a protoplasm matter is unsupported, even by the most innovating Germans, who as yet will not advance, the most advanced of them, beyond a protoplasm-cell; and that his whole argument is thus sapped in advance. But what threatens more absolute extinction of this argument still, all the German physiologists do not accept even the protoplasm-cell. Rindfleisch, for example, in his recently-published ‘Lehrbuch der pathologischen Gewebelehre’ speaks of the cell very much as we understand Virchow to have spoken of it. To him there is in the cell not only protoplasm but nucleus, and perhaps membrane as well. To him, too, the cell propagates itself quite as we have been hitherto fancying it to do, by division of the nucleus, increase of the protoplasm, and ultimate partition of the cell itself. Yet he knows withal of the opinions of others, and accepts them in a manner. He mentions Kühne’s account of the membrane as at first but a mere physical limit of two fluids—a mere peripheral film or curdling; still he assumes a formal and decided membrane at last. Even Leydig and Schultze, who shall be the express eliminators of the membrane—the one by initiation and the other by consummation—confess that, as regards the cells of certain tissues, they have never been able to detect in them the absence of a membrane.

As regards the nucleus again, the case is very much stronger. When we have admitted with Brücke that certain cryptogam cells, with Haeckel that certain protists, with Cienkowsky that two monads, and with Schultze that one amoeba, are without nucleus—when we have admitted that division of the cell may take place without implicating that of the nucleus—that the movements of the nucleus may be passive and due to those of the protoplasm—that Baer and Stricker demonstrate the disappearance of the original nucleus in the impregnated egg,—when we have admitted this, we have admitted also all that can be said in degradation of the nucleus. Even those who say all this still attribute to the nucleus an important and unknown rôle, and describe the formation in the impregnated egg of a new nucleus; while there are others again who resist every attempt to degrade it. Böttcher asserts movement for the nucleus, even when wholly removed from the cell; Neumann points to such movement in dead or dying cells; and there is other testimony to a like effect, as well as to peculiarities of the nucleus otherwise that indicate spontaneity. In this reference we may allude to the weighty opinion of the late Professor Goodsir, who anticipated in so remarkable a manner certain of the determinations of Virchow. Goodsir, in that anticipation, wonderfully rich and ingenious as he is everywhere, is perhaps nowhere more interesting and successful than in what concerns the nucleus. Of the whole cell, the nucleus is to him, as it was to Schleiden, Schwann, and others, the most important element. And this is the view to which I, who have little business to speak, wish success. This universe is not an accidental cavity, in which an accidental dust has been accidentally swept into heaps for the accidental evolution of the majestic spectacle of organic and inorganic life. That majestic spectacle is a spectacle as plainly for the eye of reason as any diagram of the mathematician. That majestic spectacle could have been constructed, was constructed, only in reason, for reason, and by reason. From beyond Orion and the Pleiades, across the green hem of earth, up to the imperial personality of man, all, the furthest, the deadest, the dustiest, is for fusion in the invisible point of the single Ego—which alone glorifies it. For the subject, and on the model of the subject, all is made. Therefore it is that—though, precisely as there are acephalous monsters by way of exception and deformity, there may be also at the very extremity of animated existence cells without a nucleus—I cannot help believing that this nucleus itself, as analogue of the subject will yet be proved the most important and indispensable of all the normal cell-elements. Even the phenomena of the impregnated egg seem to me to support this view. In the egg, on impregnation, it seems to me natural (I say it with a smile) that the old sun that ruled it should go down, and that a new sun, stronger in the combination of the new and the old, should ascend into its place!

Be these things as they may, we have now overwhelming evidence before us for concluding, with reference to Mr. Huxley’s first proposition, that—in view of the nature of microscopic science—in view of the state of belief that obtains at present as regards nucleus, membrane, and entire cell—even in view of the supporters of protoplasm itself—Mr. Huxley is not authorized to speak of a physical matter of life; which, for the rest, if granted, would, for innumerable and, as it appears to me, irrefragable reasons, be obliged to acknowledge for itself, not identity, but an infinite diversity in power, in form and in substance.

So much for the first proposition in Mr. Huxley’s essay, or that which concerns protoplasm, as a supposed matter of life, identical itself, and involving the identity of all the various organs and organisms which it is assumed to compose. What now of the second proposition, or that which concerns the materiality at once of protoplasm, and of all that is conceived to derive from protoplasm? In other words, though, so to speak, for organic bricks anything like an organic clay still awaits the proof, I ask, if the bricks are not the same because the clay is not the same, what if the materiality of the former is equally unsupported by the materiality of the latter? Or what if the functions of protoplasm are not properties of its mere molecular constitution?

For this is Mr. Huxley’s second proposition, namely, That all vital and intellectual functions are but the properties of the molecular disposition and changes of the material basis (protoplasm) of which the various animals and vegetables consist. With the conclusions now before us, it is evident that to enter at all on this part of Mr. Huxley’s argumentation is, so far as we are concerned, only a matter of grace. In order that it should have any weight, we must grant the fact, at once of the existence of a matter of life, and of all organs and organisms being but aggregates of it. This, obviously, we cannot now do. By way of hypothesis, however, we may assume it. Let it be granted, then, that pro hac vice there is a physical basis of life with all the consequences named; and now let us see how Mr. Huxley proceeds to establish its materiality.