your archeoplasm and ergastoplasm, and probably your idiozomes, plasmosomes, and many other histological minutiae10.
The position of these bodies with regard to the other cell-structures is carefully described. Sometimes they lie in the neighbourhood of the nucleus itself, that is to say in proximity to the fluid boundary surface which separates the nucleus from the cytoplasm; and in this position they often form a somewhat cloudy sphere which constitutes the Nebenkern. In the majority of cases, as in the epithelial cells, they form filamentous structures, and rows of granules, whose main direction is parallel to the axis of the cell, and which may, in some cases, and in some forms, be conspicuous at the one end, and in some cases at the other end of the cell. But I do not find that the histologists attempt to explain, or to correlate with other phenomena, the tendency of these bodies to lie parallel with the axis, and perpendicular to the extremities of the cell; it is merely noted as a peculiarity, or a specific character, of these particular structures. Extraordinarily complicated and diverse functions have been ascribed to them. Engelmannãs ãFibrillenkonus,ã which was almost certainly another aspect of the same phenomenon, was held by him and by cytologists like Breda and Heidenhain, to be an apparatus connected in some {286} unexplained way with the mechanism of ciliary movement. Meves looked upon the chondriosomes as the actual carriers or transmitters of heredity11. Altmann invented a new aphorism, Omne granulum e granulo, as a refinement of Virchowãs omnis cellula e cellula; and many other histologists, more or less in accord, accepted the chondriosomes as important entities, sui generis, intermediate in grade between the cell itself and its ultimate molecular components. The extreme cytologists of the Munich school, Popoff, Goldschmidt and others, following Richard Hertwig, declaring these structures to be identical with ãchromidiaã (under which name Hertwig ranked all extra-nuclear chromatin), would assign them complex functions in maintaining the balance between nuclear and cytoplasmic material; and the ãchromidial hypothesis,ã as every reader of recent cytological literature knows, has become a very abstruse and complicated thing12. With the help of the ãbinuclearity hypothesisã of Schaudinn and his school, it has given us the chromidial net, the chromidial apparatus, the trophochromidia, idiochromidia, gametochromidia, the protogonoplasm, and many other novel and original conceptions. The names are apt to vary somewhat in significance from one writer to another.
The outstanding fact, as it seems to me, is that physiological science has been heavily burdened in this matter, with a jargon of names and a thick cloud of hypotheses; while, from the physical point of view we are tempted to see but little mystery in the whole phenomenon, and to ascribe it, in all probability and in general terms, to the gathering or ãclumpingã together, under surface tension, of various constituents of the heterogeneous cell-content, and to the drawing out of these little clumps along the axis of the cell towards