e range of
scientific expectation that the laboratory worker of the future will
learn how so to duplicate telluric conditions that the universal forces
will build living matter out of the inorganic in the laboratory, as they
have done, and perhaps still are doing, in the terrestrial oceans.

To the timid reasoner that assumption of possibilities may seem
startling. But assuredly it is no more so than seemed, a century ago,
the assumption that man has evolved, through the agency of "natural
laws" only, from the lowest organism. Yet the timidity of that elder
day has been obliged by the progress of the past century to adapt its
conceptions to that assured sequence of events. And some day, in all
probability, the timidity of to-day will be obliged to take that final
logical step which to-day's knowledge foreshadows as a future if not a
present necessity.

THE MECHANISM OF THE CELL

Whatever future science may be able to accomplish in this direction,
however, it must be admitted that present science finds its hands quite
full, without going farther afield than to observe the succession of
generations among existing forms of life. Since the establishment of
the doctrine of organic evolution, questions of heredity, always
sufficiently interesting, have been at the very focus of attention of
the biological world. These questions, under modern treatment, have
resolved themselves, since the mechanism of such transmission has been
proximately understood, into problems of cellular activity. And much
as has been learned about the cell of late, that interesting microcosm
still offers a multitude of intricacies for solution.

Thus, at the very threshold, some of the most elementary principles of
mechanical construction of the cell are still matters of controversy. On
the one hand, it is held by Professor O. Butschli and his followers that
the substance of the typical cell is essentially alveolar, or foamlike,
comparable to an emulsion, and that the observed reticular structure of
the cell is due to the intersections of the walls of the minute ultimate
globules. But another equally authoritative school of workers holds to
the view, first expressed by Frommann and Arnold, that the reticulum is
really a system of threads, which constitute the most important basis of
the cell structure. It is even held that these fibres penetrate the cell
walls and connect adjoining cells, so that the entire body is a
reticulum. For the moment ther