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Protoplasm   Listen
noun
Protoplasm  n.  (Biol.) The viscid and more or less granular material of vegetable and animal cells, possessed of vital properties by which the processes of nutrition, secretion, and growth go forward; the so-called " physical basis of life;" the original cell substance, cytoplasm, cytoblastema, bioplasm sarcode, etc. Note: The lowest forms of animal and vegetable life (unicellular organisms) consist of simple or unaltered protoplasm; the tissues of the higher organisms, of differentiated protoplasm.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Protoplasm" Quotes from Famous Books



... inexorable as the atomic affinities, the molecular attractions that govern crystallization? Is the day dawning, when the phenomena of hypnotism will be analyzed and formulated as accurately as the symbols of chemistry, or the constituents of protoplasm, or the weird chromatics of spectroscopy? Beryl's head, that hitherto had turned restlessly on its pillow, became motionless; the closed eyes opened suddenly, fastened upon the lawyer's; and some inexplicable influence impelled her to stretch out ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson

... we cannot be surprised. The phenomena of osmosis are naturally of the first importance in the action of organisms, and for a long time have attracted the attention of naturalists. De Vries imagined that the contractions noticed in the protoplasm of cells placed in saline solutions were due to a phenomenon of osmosis, and, upon examining more closely certain peculiarities of cell life, various scholars have demonstrated that living cells are enclosed in membranes permeable to certain substances ...
— The New Physics and Its Evolution • Lucien Poincare

... December 13, 1784, died the admirable and ever to be remembered Dr. Samuel Johnson. The year 1709 was made ponderous and illustrious in English biography by his birth. My own humble advent to the world of protoplasm was in the year 1809 of the present century. Summer was just ending when those four letters, "son b." were written under the date of my birth, August 29th. Autumn had just begun when my great pre-contemporary entered this un-Christian universe ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... primarily from the worm of the deep sea mud.' The worm be-came a snake, the snake a fish, the fish a mammal, and so on. Is not this very idea at the bottom of Darwin's theory, when he maintains that the organic forms have their origin in more simple species, and says that the structureless protoplasm born in the mud of the Laurentian and Silurian periods—the Manu's 'mud of the seas,' I dare say—gradually transformed itself into the anthropoid ape, and then finally into ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky

... Streets—but then these were raw Scotch fisherman, who had not yet learned how absurd it is to suppose ourselves come from anything greater than ourselves, and had no conception of the liberty it confers on a man to know that he is the child of a protoplasm, or ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald

... no visible structure. They consist of a minute droplet of protoplasm (mycroprotein) surrounded by a delicate cell membrane. Certain forms are embedded in a capsule (diameter ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 787, January 31, 1891 • Various

... later, leads to secondary degenerations, that is, new products of the protoplasm, the most common of which is fatty degeneration. In this form fat granules and globules arise, which are at first minute, later on larger; these in certain organs, such as the liver, may become so pronounced ...
— Intestinal Ills • Alcinous Burton Jamison

... coming to, what we're here for. Well, I can tell you a little. There used to be a catch in it that bothered me, but I figured her out. Old Evolution is producing an organism that will find the right balance and perpetuate itself eternally. It's trying every way it knows to get these cells of protoplasm into some form that will change without dying. Simple enough, only it takes time. Think how long it took to get us this far out of something you can't see without glasses! But forget about time. Our time don't mean anything out there in the real world. Say we been produced in one second ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson

... my joys. I want to wash myself, soak myself in it; hang myself over a meridian to dry; dissolve (still better) into rags of soppy disintegration, blotting paper, mash and splash and hash of inarticulate protoplasm." ...
— The Upton Letters • Arthur Christopher Benson

... go back to the earliest forms of life, where the unit is simply a minute mass of protoplasm surrounded by a cell wall, we find each of these divisions to be a complete individual. It can feed itself, that its life may go on to-day; it can fight or run away, that it may be here to fight to-morrow; and by a process of division it can create a new life so that ...
— Woman in Modern Society • Earl Barnes

... upon this substance which is found in the interior of the plant cell, and which is identical with the matter found in the inside of the yeast cell, and which again contains an animal substance similar to that of which we ourselves are made up—he conferred upon this that title of "protoplasm," which has brought other people a great deal of trouble since! I beg particularly to say that, because I find many people suppose that I was the inventor of that term, whereas it has been in existence ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley

... poison upon Greece. In the case of alcohol, we now have evidence which is real and unchallengeable. The properties which it displays when we study it to-day have always been and always will be its properties. We find that it has certain actions on living protoplasm in the twentieth century; we know enough of the uniformity of nature to realize that it had those actions in the tenth century, and will have them in the thirtieth. As we study under the microscope the influence of alcohol upon ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby

... conception that the crowd is an elementary organism, from which the sect issues, like the chick from the egg, and that all other types of social groups "may, in this same manner, be deduced from this primitive social protoplasm." This is a simplification which the facts hardly justify. It is true that, implicit in the practices and the doctrines of a religious sect, there is the kernel ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park

... ovoid or globular, and the body is covered by a tightly fitting, plastic, chitin shell, which, in turn, is covered by a fine layer of protoplasm. The flexibility of the shell makes the form variable as in the amoeboid types. The thickness of the shell is quite variable. The pseudopodial opening is single and terminal. The pseudopodia are very fine, reticulate, granular, and sharply pointed, and form a loose network outside of ...
— Marine Protozoa from Woods Hole - Bulletin of the United States Fish Commission 21:415-468, 1901 • Gary N. Galkins

... his chance—more than many chances. He was the kind of protoplasm that could not endure life, that carried in itself the seed of decay,—yet—yet—" She raised her pale face with the luminous eyes and said softly: "Sometimes I wonder if it had to be. When I look at little Ned and see how health is ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)

... subject there is no doubt. The elements that compose protoplasm—the physical basis of all living things—are the familiar elements of the world without life. The mystery of life is not in the elements that compose the vital stuff. We know them all, we know their properties. The mystery consists solely in how these elements can be so combined ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XIX, No. 470, Jan. 3, 1885 • Various

... the rearrangement of the whole of the protoplasm of a cell into a new cell, which becomes free from the mother-cell, and may or may not secrete a cell-wall ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XXI., No. 531, March 6, 1886 • Various

... asked me my grandmother's opinion of protoplasm. I reflected respectfully, and then said I didn't know it had any particular shape. My gunpowdery chief went off with a bang, of course, and then went on loading and firing until he ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... Beal, on Protoplasm, p. 104 to 107, says, "Living matter overcomes gravitation and resists and suspends chemical affinity." He adds, "It is in direct opposition to chemical ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume 1, January, 1880 • Various

... begins organic life and its most distinctive function, heredity. In the homogeneous plasma of the monera, a firmer central nucleus is separated from a softer outer mass; through this differentiation of nucleus and protoplasm arises the first organic cell. For a long time our planet was inhabited solely by such Protista or single-celled primitive creatures. From coenobia or social unions of these afterwards arose the lowest ...
— Monism as Connecting Religion and Science • Ernst Haeckel

... were ever to be affected by it, and if it had no mind of its own, would it still appear good? There are two stars: one is, and ever will be, void of life, on the other exists a fragment of just living protoplasm which will never develop, will never become conscious. Can we say honestly that we feel one to be better than the other? Is life itself good as an end? A clear judgment is made difficult by the fact that ...
— Art • Clive Bell

... The energy produced by the reactions of some organic chemical groups are, therefore, of a more complicated character and of another dimension. One of these energies of organic chemistry which lately has come into the scope of scientific analysis is called life—its physico-chemical base is the protoplasm, which result I call the "time-linking" capacity or energy. This name is important for the consequences it will bring about later on. The time-binding capacity or energy of man (no matter what time is—if it ...
— Manhood of Humanity. • Alfred Korzybski

... natural birth. If the actual facts could be ignored, how nicely the parallel would run! "The idea involves a contradiction." For an animal to make an animal, or a plant to make a plant, supposes it to select carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, to combine these into cellulose and protoplasm, to join with these some phosphorus, lime, etc., to build them into structures and usefully-adjusted organs. A man who can believe that plants and animals can do this (not, indeed, in the crude way suggested, but in the appointed way) "might as well believe in ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray

... Franz-Josef von Thun, and by many others. I have no doubt that they were actually generated. But with our modern appliances, with our greater skill, what might it not be possible to do now if we had the courage? There are chemists toiling away in their laboratories to create the primitive protoplasm from matter which is dead, the organic from the inorganic. I have studied their experiments. I know all that they know. Why shouldn't one work on a larger scale, joining to the knowledge of the old adepts the scientific discovery of the moderns? I don't know ...
— The Magician • Somerset Maugham

... contain only sweet juice, but in other parts of the orange-tree or any other plant they contain a sticky substance with little grains in it. This substance is called "protoplasm," or the first form of life, for it is alive and active, and under a microscope you may see in a living plant streams of the little grains moving ...
— The Fairy-Land of Science • Arabella B. Buckley

... mankind. The one is a tendency from Polytheism to Monotheism; the other from Polytypism to Monotypism of the earliest forms of life-all animal and vegetable forms having at length come to be regarded as differentiations of a single substance-to wit, protoplasm. ...
— God the Known and God the Unknown • Samuel Butler

... place at the disposition of man; and at the same time Sir Athelstone could with difficulty be held in leash while he impatiently awaited an opportunity to explain how excessively near he had arrived to the direct production of protoplasm from inanimate matter, and the chemical control of living cells, so that henceforth man could people or unpeople the earth as ...
— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss

... Again, let us suppose that three compound substances—water, carbonic acid, and ammonia—are present together with appropriate conditions; it is said that they will combine to form a gummy transparent matter, which is called protoplasm. This protoplasm may be found in small shapeless lumps, or it may be found enclosed in cells, and in various beautifully shaped coverings, and it is also found in the blood, and in all growing parts or organs of all animals and plants of ...
— Creation and Its Records • B.H. Baden-Powell

... more and more impressed with the moral qualities of vegetables, and contemplate forming a science which shall rank with comparative anatomy and comparative philology,—the science of comparative vegetable morality. We live in an age of protoplasm. And, if life-matter is essentially the same in all forms of life, I purpose to begin early, and ascertain the nature of the plants for which I am responsible. I will not associate with any vegetable which is disreputable, or has not some quality ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... chain of evolution in animal life from its inception in primordial protoplasm to its end, as we now find it, we discover that the interlinking organisms are, in the beginning, either asexual or hermaphroditic. The moneron, the lowest form of animal life, simply multiplies by division. The different elements ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir

... laughed. "We live in two separate worlds," said he. "The Hyla is the little green tree frog, and Beale has founded some of his views on protoplasm upon the appearances, of its nerve cells. It is a subject in which I take ...
— Beyond the City • Arthur Conan Doyle

... seek to bridge the chasm 'Twixt man to-day and protoplasm, Who theorize and probe and gape, And finally evolve an ape— Yours is a harmless sort of cult, If you are pleased with the result. Some folks admit, with cynic grace, That you have rather proved your case. These dogmatists ...
— The Sisters' Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich

... not precisely the question with which the speculative young man of our own day is likely to puzzle himself, or exercise the patience of his neighbour in a railway carriage, of his dog, or even of a Chinese; though the questions we are apt to tear to pieces, organism and environment, or protoplasm perhaps, or evolution, or the Zeit-geist and its doings, may, in their turn, come to seem quite as lifeless and unendurable. As the theological heresy of one age sometimes becomes the mere commonplace of the next, so, in matters of philosophic enquiry, it might appear that the all-absorbing ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater

... adapted for filtration, and yet they do not filter. Hence some other factor must join itself to the physico-mechanical process of filtration and affect or destroy it, and this factor can be found only in the protoplasm, the vital element of the cells; for we know that the sublimate acts with pernicious effect on it and in such a manner that it destroys its entire power of reaction; it kills it, as ...
— At the Deathbed of Darwinism - A Series of Papers • Eberhard Dennert

... scarcely any shadow in it; it's more shimmery, as if I'd painted the shimmering protoplasm in the leaves and everywhere, and not the stiffness of the shape. That seems dead to me. Only this shimmeriness is the real living. The shape is a dead crust. The shimmer is ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence

... it: you have really prepared protoplasm. By force of meditation, profound study, minute care, impregnable patience, your desire is realised: you have extracted from your apparatus an albuminous slime, easily corruptible and stinking like the devil at the end of a few days: in short, ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre

... the coach Mrs. Mostyn was descanting on the evolution of the nautilus, and the relationship of protoplasm and humanity, to Colonel Delville, who sat smiling placidly behind an immense cigar, and accepted the most stupendous facts and the most appalling theories with a friendly little nod of ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon

... Philadelphian that Wordsworth was the only poet worth considering, after Shakespeare, and that Keats had no intellectual value whatever. But I was not looking for intellectual value. I mixed up the intellect with a kind of scientific jargon about protoplasm and natural selection and the survival of the fittest, and bathybius, which was then all the fashion; so I promptly devoted myself to ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan

... Professor Huxley unhesitatingly adopts the "well founded doctrine, that life is the cause and not the consequence of organization." In his celebrated article "On the Physical Basis of Life," however, he maintains, that life is a property of protoplasm, and that protoplasm owes its properties to the nature and disposition of its molecules. Hence he terms it "the matter of life," and believes that all the physical properties of organized beings are due ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace

... matter of fact, they are nothing more or less than the results of evolution, natural selection and the survival of the fittest. All we require for the demonstration of our theory, is a little bit of protoplasm at the beginning of things and a mass of elemental matter in ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)

... protoplasm you matter-mongers prompt to prate; "Of jelly-speck development and apes that ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton

... 15.—Diagrammatic representation of a motor neurone magnified 300 diameters. Whereas the nerve cell and its branching processes (the dendrons) form but a minute speck of protoplasm, the nerve fibre which arises from it, although microscopic in diameter, extends a very long distance; in some cases it is a yard long; consequently only a minute fraction of the nerve fibre is ...
— The Brain and the Voice in Speech and Song • F. W. Mott

... soul is "a volatile odoriferous principle, capable of solution in glycerine". Psychogen is the name he gives to it, and his experiments show that it is present not merely in the body as a whole, but in every individual cell, in the ovum, and even in the ultimate elements of protoplasm. I need hardly say to so intelligent an audience as this, that these highly interesting experiments of Dr. Jaeger are corroborated by many facts, both physiological and psychological, that have been always noticed ...
— The Life of Buddha and Its Lessons • H.S. Olcott

... be anything better. I should like to know,' cried the professor angrily, 'where we should all be without Protoplasm.' ...
— 'That Very Mab' • May Kendall and Andrew Lang

... hunter too was I, born of the wild, And the game flavor of the infinite Tainted me to the bone—he waved me on, On to the tangent field beyond all orbs, Where form nor order nor continuance Hath thought nor name; there unity exhales In want of confine, and the protoplasm May beat and beat, in aimless vehemence, Through vagrant spaces, ...
— Memories and Studies • William James

... an individual with an imperfect idea of honesty. Now, that individual is the consequence of his father and mother and his environment, and his father and mother of theirs, and so backwards to the single-celled protoplasm. That individual is a result of the cosmic order, the inevitable product of cause and effect. We know that. We must admit that he is just as much a fact of the universe as a shower of rain or a storm at sea that swallows ...
— The Human Machine • E. Arnold Bennett

... usually the decaying parts of plants, in the form of veins and net-works of veins, giving rise to a copiously-branched reticulated or frill-like expansion, which covers surfaces varying in extent from a few to several centimeters. They are chiefly composed of a soft protoplasm of the consistence of cream, which may be readily spread out into a shapeless smear, and is usually colorless, but sometimes exhibits brilliant colors of yellow, orange, rose, purple, etc. The development of the ...
— The Myxomycetes of the Miami Valley, Ohio • A. P. Morgan

... up of constituents of the anthocyan and of the yellow group. The anthocyan dye is limited to the sap-cavity of the cells, while the yellow and pure orange colors are fixed in special organs of the protoplasm. The observation under the microscope shows at once the different units, which though lying in the same cell and in almost immediate vicinity of each other are always wholly separated from one another by the wall of the ...
— Species and Varieties, Their Origin by Mutation • Hugo DeVries

... was strong in the mind of young Huxley. He realized that Nature was moving, growing, changing all things. He had studied embryology, and had seen how the body of a man begins as a single minute mass of protoplasm, without organs ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard

... learn to breathe, and digest, and circulate his blood. Although his father and mother were fully grown adults when he was conceived, he was not conceived or even born fully grown: he had to go back and begin as a speck of protoplasm, and to struggle through an embryonic lifetime, during part of which he was indistinguishable from an embryonic dog, and had neither a skull nor a backbone. When he at last acquired these articles, he was for some time doubtful whether he was a bird ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw

... read one or two interesting brochures lately—viz., Stirling the Hegelian versus Huxley and protoplasm; Tylor in "Journal of Royal Institute" on the survivals of old ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin

... cannot avoid attributing to it the two factors which constitute personality, namely, intelligence and volition. We are therefore brought to the conclusion that this universally diffused essence, which we might think of as a sort of spiritual protoplasm, must possess all the qualities of personality without that conscious recognition of self which constitutes separate individuality: and since the word "personality" has became so associated in our ordinary talk ...
— The Edinburgh Lectures on Mental Science • Thomas Troward

... (see chapter IV) is recommended at p. 49, Science Gossip, 1879, by a French scientist, for "preserving delicate organisms." "It is especially good in histological researches, as it acts like osmic acid, burning up the protoplasm, bringing out the minutiae, and showing the nuclei, outlines of cells, etc. It is used as a saturated solution in distilled or very pure spring water; sea-water also dissolves it. The concentrated solution, of a lovely ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne

... probability that originally all folk-tales of a serious character were interspersed with rhyme, and took therefore the form of the cante-fable. It is indeed unlikely that the ballad itself began as continuous verse, and the cante-fable is probably the protoplasm out of which both ballad and folk-tale have been differentiated, the ballad by omitting the narrative prose, the folk-tale by expanding it. In "Childe Rowland" we have the nearest example to such protoplasm, and it is not difficult to see how it could have been shortened into ...
— English Fairy Tales • Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.)

... a little course of science. Everything, Bertrand (much as it may surprise you), has three states: a vapour, a liquid, a solid. These are fortune in the vapour: these are ideas. What are ideas? the protoplasm of wealth. To your head—which, by the way, is solid, Bertrand—what are they but foul air? To mine, to my prehensile and constructive intellects, see, as I grasp and work them, to what lineaments of the future they transform themselves: a ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XV • Robert Louis Stevenson

... diameter; they always occur in the nests, except in the very young portion of the gardens. They consist of aggregations of peculiar swollen hyphae, and are termed by Moeller the "Kohl-rabi clumps." The hyphae swell out at the ends into large spherical thickenings, filled with richly vacuolated protoplasm like the ordinary hyphae. These clumps of "Kohl-rabi" are only found on the surface of the garden, and form the principal food of the ants; they have no doubt reached their present form under the cultivation and selection ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay

... simple one. It involves none of the clumsy brain surgery of your Earthly science. We of Xollar have found that the real Intelligence of a being is an invisible force not at all dependent for existence upon the protoplasm through which it manifests. My Intelligence can function quite as well in your brain cells ...
— Zehru of Xollar • Hal K. Wells

... quite unaccountably, happened to be naval history. There is no laying down rules as to subjects; you just possess them—or rather, they possess you—and their genesis or protoplasm is rarely to be tracked down. Selina had never so much as seen the sea; but for that matter neither had I ever set foot on the American continent, the by-ways of which I knew so intimately. And just as I, if set down without warning in the middle of the Rocky Mountains, would have been ...
— Dream Days • Kenneth Grahame

... admitting that there are many cases in which the action of similar conditions appears to have produced corresponding changes in different species; and we have a very elaborate discussion of the direct action of the medium in modifying the protoplasm of simple organisms, so as to bring about the difference between the outer surface and the inner part that characterises the cells or other units ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace

... of amusing the Devil, and giving him an abundance of work, all directed to destroying the happiness of God's finest creation—man. Treating the Devil from a Darwinian point of view, we may assert that he developed himself from the protoplasm of ignorance, and in the gloomy fog of fear and superstition grew by degrees into a formidable monster, being changed by the overheated imaginations of dogmatists into a reptile, an owl, a raven, a dog, a wolf, a lion, a centaur, a being half monkey, half man, till, finally, ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies

... system the cells derive their names from the vein forming the Tupper margin: e.g. all just below the radius are radial cells; and they are numbered from the base outward, as radial 1, 2, etc.: the living unit; protoplasm differentiated into cytoplasm and nucleus, from which units all but the lowest plants and animals are developed by division and consequent increase into a multicellular condition: a compartment or division of ...
— Explanation of Terms Used in Entomology • John. B. Smith

... Used apparently for protoplasm, a substance constituting the physical basis of life ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning

... inorganic is fading more and more from the minds of investigators. Protoplasm, for instance, mingles together mechanical, chemical, and vital in a fused whole, which it passes the wit of man to analyse. The connection between body and soul is similarly found to defy the old distinctions between matter and mind. Clearly ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer

... blank in the great ocean of life, where beings dwell without minds to govern their actions. It would be a great calamity to have all the untrained minds shocked so seriously as to cause them to lose the mite of reason they now have, and be sent back once more to dwell in Darwin's protoplasm. I tell you there is danger, and we must be careful and show the people small stars, and but one at a time, till they can begin to reason and realize that God has done all that the wisest can ...
— Philosophy of Osteopathy • Andrew T. Still

... PROTOPLASM (Gr. protos; and plasso I mould). The elementary basis of organised tissues. Sometimes used synonymously for the "sarcode" ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson

... our theory of the origin of life on the physical plane, whether we regard it as commencing in a vivified slime at the bottom of the sea, which we call protoplasm, or in any other way, the question of how life got there still remains unanswered. The protoplasm being material substance, must have its origin like all other material substances, in the undifferentiated ...
— The Law and the Word • Thomas Troward

... ascending or descending, there is undoubtedly a vast distance between logical argumentation and anything he has yet advanced. But even on the "harder" ground the Archbishop treads no more firmly. He demands to know how the original protoplasm became endowed with life, and if that question cannot be answered he calls upon us to admit his theory of divine agency, as though that made the subject more intelligible. Supernatural hypotheses are but refuges of ignorance. Earl Beaconsfield, in his impish way, once remarked that where knowledge ...
— Arrows of Freethought • George W. Foote

... I saw the machine that disintegrated. I still say there was enough protoplasm residue for ...
— The Colors of Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley

... to the success of phenomena than any form of artificial light; moonlight is far better than sunlight. It has lately been shown that light exerts a powerful physical pressure, and is a disruptive agency, destroying protoplasm and many of the lower forms of life. We only have to see the effect of sunlight upon a photographic plate to appreciate its power. The absurdity of assuming that light plays no part in such manifestations—where very delicate, subtle, and ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington

... called Materialism. It turned out, however, that the public regarded it as an argument in favor of Materialism. This we think was a very natural, if not an unavoidable mistake, on the part of the public. For in that Essay, he says that Protoplasm, or the physical basis of life, "is a kind of matter common to all living beings, that the powers or faculties of all kinds of living matter, diverse as they may be in degree, are substantially of the same kind." Protoplasm as far as examined contains the four elements,—carbon, ...
— What is Darwinism? • Charles Hodge

... awareness of later times, but at the first only ill-defined, perhaps no more than the awareness of acid chains of molecules that formed into non-crystalline viscid protoplasm on another planet across the universe. No distinct line of cleavage where affinity to other chemicals left off and sentient selectivity began marked the distinction here as ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton

... to give them all a turn and treat them fairly; for such things had their delicate susceptibilities, as Hans Andersen had taught us to know, and might starve and suffer,—why not? being made of protoplasm, ...
— Real Folks • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney

... to make the title of this discourse generally intelligible, I have translated the term "Protoplasm," which is the scientific name of the substance of which I am about to speak, by the words "the physical basis of life." I suppose that, to many, the idea that there is such a thing as a physical basis, or matter, of life may be novel—so widely spread is the conception of life ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley

... of abiogenesis may be taken as disproved. It must be noted, however, that this disproof relates only to known existing organisms. All these are composed of a definite substance, known as protoplasm (q.v.), and the modern refutation of abiogenesis applies only to the organic forms in which protoplasm now exists. It may be that in the progress of science it may yet become possible to construct living protoplasm from non-living material. The refutation of abiogenesis has no further bearing ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... kangaroo-rat through the long lineage of the pithecanthropus, the ape-man, the man-ape, and so forth? And why stop at the kangaroo-rat—the first mammal to bring forth its young alive? Why not continue his lineage right back to the original bi-cellular organism—protoplasm? If these are our humble beginnings, what a progression to Man, so "noble in ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones

... that of Richard Hertwig, who inclined to think that these cells sometimes developed from the protoplasm of the Radiolarian, and failing to verify the observations of Cienkowski, maintained the opinion of Haeckel that the yellow cells "fur den Stoffwechsel der Radiolarien von Bedeutung sind." In a later publication (1879) ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 324, March 18, 1882 • Various

... Huxley] that the granulate heaps and the transparent gelatinous matter in which they are embedded represent masses of protoplasm. Take away the cysts which characterize the Radiolaria, and a dead Sphaerozoum would very nearly represent one of this deep-sea "Urschleim," which must, I think, be regarded as a new form of those simple animated ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley - A Character Sketch • Leonard Huxley

... protoplasm, you have another guess. We can by experience and tests prove two and two make four. We can by practice and experience prove that love, kindness, help, gentleness, sympathy, cheer and ...
— Evening Round Up - More Good Stuff Like Pep • William Crosbie Hunter

... ending in the humming-bird, another in the hippopotamus, a third in the kangaroo, etc., and their pedigrees (however far back they might be traced) would not join until they reached some primitive form of protoplasm,—Yours faithfully, ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant

... in the theory of the Iliad as a patchwork by many hands, in many ages, which nobody explains; which, indeed, nobody seems to find difficult. Yet the difficulty is insuperable. Even if we take refuge with Wilamowitz in the idea that the Cyclic and Homeric poems were at first mere protoplasm of lays of many ages, and that they were all compiled, say in the sixth century, into so many narratives, we come no nearer to explaining why the tone, taste, and ideas of two such narratives— Illiad and Odyssey—are confessedly distinct from the tone, taste, and ideas of all the others. ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang

... are made of iron, steel, wood, etc., and both print; but the plan of their structure differs throughout, and some parts are wanting in the simpler press which are present and absolutely essential in the other. So with the two sorts of animals; they are built up originally out of protoplasm, or the original jelly-like germinal matter, which fills the cells composing their tissues, and nearly the same chemical elements occur in both, but the mode in which these are combined, the arrangement of their products: the muscular, nervous and ...
— Our Common Insects - A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, - Gardens and Houses • Alpheus Spring Packard

... alkali in the sap. Try the effect of immersing a blue morning glory in an acid solution, or a deep pink one in an alkaline solution. One theory to account for the presence of color is that it exists to screen the plant's protoplasm from light; that it has a physiological function with which insects have nothing whatever to do; and that by its presence the temperature is raised and the plant is protected from cold. Every one who has handled ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan

... over vast areas of unruffled water was not due, therefore, to mechanical agitation, and must have had some other and more subtle cause. What the nature was of the impulse that stimulated whole square miles of floating protoplasm into luminous activity so suddenly as to produce the visual impression of an electric flash, I could not conjecture. The officers of the U. S. revenue cutter McCulloch observed and recorded in Bering Sea, in August, 1898, a display of phosphorescence which was almost as remarkable as the one ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan

... embryo. He is maturing now, and is radiant in Rachel's sympathetic comprehension of him. He refers to the time before he knew her as his "protoplasmic state," as indeed it was. But there are a good many of us who would be willing to remain protoplasm all our lives to possess a tithe of his genius—you and I among the number, Tabby. You needn't look at me so reproachfully out of your old-gold eyes. ...
— The Love Affairs of an Old Maid • Lilian Bell

... barely in time. In a matter of seconds after they had dropped it before the monarch, the slug had collapsed into a half-liquid puddle of decomposed protoplasm on the floor. One of the main functions—if not the main function—of the red acid, it seemed, was to act as a powerful digestive juice for His Majesty's food, predigesting it before it was taken into ...
— The Raid on the Termites • Paul Ernst

... intricate chains whose individual links are amino acids. Proteins are the very stuff of life. All living protoplasm, animal or plant, is largely composed of proteins. There are virtually an infinite number of different proteins but all are composed of the same few dozen amino acids hooked together in highly variable patterns. Amino acids themselves are highly ...
— How and When to Be Your Own Doctor • Dr. Isabelle A. Moser with Steve Solomon

... scientists tell us, are the result of a long series of evolutionary development. They tell us that Nature started with a single cell of protoplasm, a single cell of living organism, and produced the present human species after the life and death of an illimitable number of forms through the stages of countless ages, not exempting those lives from the fear, torture and ...
— Tyranny of God • Joseph Lewis

... unreserved manner, yet was strangely jealous on some points. I called on him two or three times before the voyage of the "Beagle", and on one occasion he asked me to look through a microscope and describe what I saw. This I did, and believe now that it was the marvellous currents of protoplasm in some vegetable cell. I then asked him what I had seen; but he answered me, "That ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin

... "And protoplasm was inorganic and undifferentiated, containing all things in potential energy: and a spirit of evolution ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange

... spelling-book as it were, with the alphabet set out in pictures. You are told by sagacious professors,—who after all are no more than children in their newly studied wisdom,—that human life was evolved in the first instance from protoplasm—as they THINK,—but they lack the ability to tell you how the protoplasm was itself evolved—and WHY; where the material came from that went to the making of millions of solar systems and trillions of living organisms concerning whose existence we have no knowledge ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli

... primal ooze caused germs of life to originate in small bubble-like forms, (vesicles). His words are: "The first step in the creation of life upon this planet was a chemico-electric operation by which simple germinal vesicles were produced." The vesicles consisted of protoplasm, the simple substance (white-of-egg) which exists in the cells of animal and vegetable tissues, and which is composed of oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and traces of other elements. From this original protoplasm the great ...
— Evolution - An Investigation and a Critique • Theodore Graebner

... amoeba does, and exchange it for some other article as soon as it has done eating? How marvellously does the analogy hold between the purse and the stomach alike as regards form and function; and I may say in passing that, as usual, the organ which is the more remote from protoplasm is at once more special, more an object of our consciousness, and less an object of ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler

... of evolution have to believe that God allowed the sun to form out of the nebula, and the earth to form from the sun, that He allowed Man to develop slowly from the speck of protoplasm in the sea. That at some period of Man's gradual evolution from the brute, God found Man guilty of some sin, and cursed him. That some thousands of years later God sent His only Son down upon the earth to ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford

... them had heard the term "evolution;" knew anything about "the survival of the fittest." They were entirely ignorant of "protoplasm" or "bioplasm;" yet not one of them but had caught the meaning of some of these terms as they had been translated for them into the vernacular of the city slums; not one in the class but perceived that their champion arguer had been met on his own ground ...
— Ester Ried Yet Speaking • Isabella Alden

... the nature of some large, transparent, spore-like elliptical cells (fungal?) whose protoplasm was rotating, while it was at the same time charged with triangular grains of starch, I observed some actinophorous rhizopods creeping about them, which had similar shaped grains of starch in their interior; ...
— The Dawn of Reason - or, Mental Traits in the Lower Animals • James Weir

... except "Mamma Marion" and her friends, who came to drink tea and talk about "Protoplasm," and the "Higher Education of Women," which wasn't at all interesting to poor Curly. She always sat by, quietly and demurely, and Miss Inches hoped was listening and being improved, but really she was thinking about something else, or longing to climb a tree or have ...
— Nine Little Goslings • Susan Coolidge

... replacing it by very minute particles of highly colored glass. Shortly afterward he noticed a collection of these particles of glass in the body of the creature, and a little later he saw a tiny speck of protoplasm emitted from the parent by separation. At the same time he noticed that the bits of glass collected by the mother creature were passed out and placed around the body of the new creature, and cemented together by a substance secreted by the body of the parent, thus forming a shell and covering ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka

... the idea that the forces which rule in the realm of living things are not different from the forces that we know in the inanimate world. He has made some very striking and arresting experiments with protoplasm and chemical stimuli and opened a new field of problems in biology. If the physical universe can be so increasingly explored, shall not the spiritual universe be also penetrated by the spiritual ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting

... heard from the lips of the Man, "Worker of iniquity!" and woke with a great start. From that moment truths began to be facts to him. The beginning of the change was indeed very small, but every beginning is small, and every beginning is a creation. Monad, molecule, protoplasm, whatever word may be attached to it when it becomes appreciable by men—being then, however, many stages, I believe, upon its journey—beginning is an irrepressible fact; and, however far from good or humble even after many days, the man here began to grow good and humble. His dull, unimaginative ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various

... been evolved from simple living substance protoplasm, by a process of evolution, it will some day be possible to write a history of that process. But have we yet sufficient knowledge to justify ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler

... Finger-and-toe is known as Plasmodiophora brassicae, and it belongs to the Myxomycetes, or {}slime-fungi,' which, as a rule, live upon decaying vegetable material. The protoplasm of the fungus ramifies among and within the tissues of the roots of attacked plants, and eventually produces an amazing number of spores so small that more than thirty millions would be required to cover a superficial inch. A microscope ...
— The Culture of Vegetables and Flowers From Seeds and Roots, 16th Edition • Sutton and Sons

... family tree to its rootlets, our amebic ancestors, and the craving for more freedom is manifest in the soul of even the lowest, buried in darkness and slime. When the first clever bit of colloidal ooze, protoplasm as the ameba, protruded a bit of itself as a pseudopod, it achieved a new freedom. For, accidentally or deliberately, it created for itself a new power—the ability to go directly for food in its environment, instead of waiting, patiently, passively, as the plant does, ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.

... thirty-six hours, the capillaries of the part adjacent to the wound begin to throw out minute buds and fine processes, which bridge the gap and form a firmer, but still temporary, connection between the two sides. Each bud begins in the wall of the capillary as a small accumulation of granular protoplasm, which gradually elongates into a filament containing a nucleus. This filament either joins with a neighbouring capillary or with a similar filament, and in time these become hollow and are filled with blood from the vessels that gave them origin. In this way a series ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles

... appointment with a friend. After this they met almost every day, and Remsen was a frequent caller at Joel's room, where he with Joel and Outfield held long, cosy chats about every subject from enameling golf balls to the Philosophy of Kant and the Original Protoplasm. ...
— The Half-Back • Ralph Henry Barbour

... individual than a blind force. For though his personality was strong, that of the place was stronger. Half out of the soil, minded like the dormouse and the beetle, he was, by virtue of his unspoken passion, the protoplasm of a poet. ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb

... special purpose, I have not the least doubt, from the observations of Delpino, and more especially from those of Mr. Belt on Acacia sphaerocephala, and on passion-flowers. This acacia likewise produces, as an additional attraction to ants, small bodies containing much oil and protoplasm, and analogous bodies are developed by a Cecropia for the same purpose, as described by Fritz Muller. (10/50. Mr. Belt 'The Naturalist in Nicaragua' 1874 page 218, has given a most interesting account of the paramount ...
— The Effects of Cross & Self-Fertilisation in the Vegetable Kingdom • Charles Darwin

... Babel of names—and Great Britain was grandly represented. Those three superhuman men, who had each had a peep behind the veil of creation, and discovered the mystery of life, attended the party and became centres of three circles—the circle that believed in "protoplasm," the circle that believed in "bioplasm," and the circle that believed in "atomized charges of electricity, conducted into the system by the oxygen of respiration." Lectures and demonstrations went on all through the evening, all over the magnificent room engaged ...
— Heart and Science - A Story of the Present Time • Wilkie Collins

... Organisms are not added to by accretion, as in the case of minerals, but by growth. And the spiritual faculties are organized in the spiritual protoplasm of the soul, just as other faculties are organized in the protoplasm of the body. Natural Law, ...
— Beautiful Thoughts • Henry Drummond

... twists Of trunk and tail alternate, winked huge goggles Derisively and gurgled. "Me get out, The Science-vouched, and Literature-upheld, And Reason-rehabilitated butt Of many years of misdirected mockery? You ask omniscient HUXLEY, cocksure oracle On all from protoplasm to Home Rule, From Scripture to Sea Serpents; go consult Belligerent, brave, beloved BILLY RUSSELL! Verisimilitude incarnate, I Scorn your vain sceptic mirth! Besides, behold The portent riding me, as Thetis rode The lolloping, wolloping sea-horse of old! Is it less likely ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, January 21, 1893 • Various

... yet proved the connecting link between organic and inorganic life. I say life, for I take it that this company admits that a slab of granite is as much alive as any man or woman I see before me. But I have manufactured gold, and I could have manufactured protoplasm if I had devoted my life to that object. My studies have been almost wholly on the inorganic plane. Hence the 'philosopher's stone' came in my way, but not the 'elixir of life.' The molecules of protoplasm are only a little ...
— The Crack of Doom • Robert Cromie

... are we made serious and solemn and sublime by mountain heights, grave and contemplative by an abundance of overhanging trees, reduced to inconstancy and monkey capers by the ripples on a sandy beach? Did the protoplasm—but enough. The chemists are looking into the matter, and before long they will have all life in the table of ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry

... capacities of his soldiers have placed our rival action [his own and that of Sir W. White] in perfect harmony with the crushing logic of fact. The rivalry is thus completely swamped in the bit of cosmic work so successfully accomplished. A State has been evolved out of the protoplasm of Balkan chaos. ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose

... in the presence of the one incommunicable gulf—the gulf of all gulfs—that gulf which Mr. Huxley's protoplasm is as powerless to efface as any other material expedient that has ever been suggested since the eyes of men first looked into it—the mighty gulf between death and life."—"As Regards Protoplasm." By J. Hutchinson Stirling, LL.D., ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond

... the more dangerous to yourself. You are too sad to know that you are not happy or to care. Does my diagnosis surprise you? Analyze the argument of your last letter. You trace the growth of the emotion of love from protoplasm to man. You follow the progress of the force which is stronger than hunger and cold and swifter and more final than death, from its potential state in the unicellular stage where life goes on by division, up through the multifarious forms of instinctive animal ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London

... man is born of full stature, with his hat and boots on; we know that he grows from an infant, and we know the infant grows from a fetus, and that the fetus grows from a bit of nucleated protoplasm in the mother's womb. Why may not the race of man grow from a like simple beginning? It seems to be the order of nature; it IS the order of nature,—first the germ, the inception, then the slow growth from the simple to the complex. It is the order of our own thoughts, our own ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs

... supplanted by electricity and he worships Huxley rather than Christ crucified—Huxley!" and the cardinal threw up his hands. "Did ever a man die the easier because he had grovelled at the knees of Huxley? What did Huxley preach? The doctrine of despair. He was the Pope of protoplasm. He beat his wings against the bars of the unknowable. He set his finite mind the task of solving the infinite. A mere creature, he sought to fathom the mind of his creator. Read the lines upon his tomb, written by his wife—what do they teach? Nothing but 'let us eat and drink, for to-morrow ...
— The Turquoise Cup, and, The Desert • Arthur Cosslett Smith

... stuffed out with hopes and fears, Too homely for us pretty dears, Who want one that conviction carries, Last make of London or of Paris. He gone, I felt a moment's spasm, But calmed myself, with Protoplasm, A finer name, and, what is more, As enigmatic as before; Greek, too, and sure to fill with ease Minds caught in the Symplegades 150 Of soul and sense, life's two conditions, Each baffled with its own omniscience. ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell

... the cosmic drama should have followed this particular course; that from the cooling down of fiery nebulas there should have come forth the orderly system we behold in nature; that life should have climbed up from the speck of protoplasm "through primal ooze and slime," making its way step by step through all the lower creation until it "blossomed into man"—this, to the unbiassed mind, does not wear the aspect of mere incalculable accident, but of ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer

... standard, ideal, reference, scantling, type; archetype, antitype^; protoplast, module, exemplar, example, ensample^, paradigm; lay-figure. text, copy, design; fugleman^, keynote. die, mold; matrix, last, plasm^; proplasm^, protoplasm; mint; seal, punch, intaglio, negative; stamp. V. be an example, be a role model, set an example; set a copy. Phr. a precedent embalms a principle [Lat.Tran] ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... common with the trees! The same mysterious gift of life, to begin with; the same primary elements—carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and so on—in our bodies; and many of the same vital functions—respiration, circulation, absorption, assimilation, reproduction. Protoplasm is the basis of life in both, and the cell is the architect that builds up the bodies of both. Trees are rooted men and men are walking trees. The tree absorbs its earth materials through the minute hairs on its rootlets, ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs

... starting-point of this mighty process is not merely this or that, has not merely this or that quality or possibility, it is; and in the power of that little word is enclosed a whole world of thought, which is there at the first, remains there all through the evolutions of the protoplasm, will be there when these are done, is in fact independent of time and space, has nothing to do with such distinctions, expresses rather their ultimate unreality. So far then as Parmenides and his school kept a firm ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall

... know. But they stick to it that "that bed of reeds still exists". Educated Zulus appear somewhat inclined to take the expression in an allegorical sense, and to understand the reeds either as a kind of protoplasm or as a creator who was mortal. "He exists no longer. As my grandfather no longer exists, he too no longer exists; he died." Chiefs who wish to claim high descent trace their pedigree to Uthlanga, as the Homeric kings traced theirs to Zeus. The myths ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang

... gently and so healingly, that I was rather glad I had committed the crime, far the sake of the letter. I afterward called on him and told him to make perfectly free with any ideas of mine that struck him as being good protoplasm for poetry. He could see by that that there wasn't anything mean about me; so we got along right from the start. I have not met Doctor Holmes many times since; and lately he said—However, I am wandering wildly away from the one thing which I got on my feet to do; that is, to make my compliments ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... synthesis could put into the cell, apparently nothing more than a simple clot of nucleated protoplasm, that activity sine matter, that potential vital force, that mysterious factor which causes a cell to develop ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori

... in the central globe, and on its severed end atoms of protoplasm were already clustered. "Literally a second-hand article," thought Ronald; but, not venturing to translate the idiom, he only bowed and said, "Ach so!" which means any thing and every thing ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 8 • Various

... be better on the whole if each individual took a fresh start as far as possible on the advantageous typical lines laid down by natural selection? Through the long stages of evolution from primaeval protoplasm upwards, such species as were least affected by use-inheritance would be most free to develop necessary but seldom-used organs, protective coverings such as shells or skulls, and natural weapons, defences, ornaments, special adaptations, and so forth; and this would be an advantage—for ...
— Are the Effects of Use and Disuse Inherited? - An Examination of the View Held by Spencer and Darwin • William Platt Ball

... dissecting-room, I make my observations under the blue sky, to the song of the Cicadae (The Cicada Cigale, an insect akin to the Grasshopper and found more particularly in the south of France.—Translator's Note.); you subject cell and protoplasm to chemical tests, I study instinct in its loftiest manifestations; you pry into death, I pry into life. And why should I not complete my thought: the boars have muddied the clear stream; natural history, youth's glorious study, has, by dint of cellular ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre

... hymns and priests have driven out of his wits. Five men in this place, they tell me, five men in this place who might have been fathers of families, and every one of them thinks he is God the Father. Oh! you may talk about the ugliness of science, but there is no one here who thinks he is Protoplasm." ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton

... insensibility. There may be convulsions or tetanic spasms, with evacuation of urine and faeces. Death results from paralysis of the central nervous system, but artificial respiration is useless, as the drug promptly arrests the heart's action. It also kills the protoplasm of the red blood-corpuscles, rendering them useless ...
— Aids to Forensic Medicine and Toxicology • W. G. Aitchison Robertson

... it not—but many things beside; Behemoth old, Leviathans that ride. And protoplasm, and jellies of ...
— The Voice of the Machines - An Introduction to the Twentieth Century • Gerald Stanley Lee

... Suddhavidya or true knowledge, explained as the principle of correlation between the experiencer and that which is experienced. It is only after these that we come to Maya, meaning not so much illusion as the substratum in which Karma inheres or the protoplasm from which all things grow. Between Maya and Purusha come five more tattvas, called envelopes. Their effect is to enclose and limit, thus turning the divine spirit ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot

... semi-transparent, gelatine, opal-tinted, soon to be sea-stained a yellowish green) is slowly expelled from the parent's body—I have been witness to the birth—each contains about one-sixth ounce of vital element, fluid and glistening. Physical changes in this protoplasm manifest themselves in the course of a few days. The central portion becomes a little less fluid, and from an inchoate blur a resemblance to a diaphanous shell develops and floats, cloud-like, in a perfectly limpid atmosphere. Gradually it ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield

... fire in the hall Percival stood while Mrs. Akemit reclined picturesquely near by, and Doctor von Herzlich explained, with excessive care as to his enunciation, that protoplasm can be analysed but cannot be reconstructed; following this with his own view as to why the synthesis ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson

... exclaimed Thurston. "It's monstrous; indecent! It thought—no question of that—but no body! Horrible! Just a raw, naked, thinking protoplasm!" ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various

... perfectly useful. The working out of the evolution theory as applied to animal minds, the study of the first beginnings of nerve action, and the analysis of instinct, all due largely to Darwin's prominent disciple, Romanes, together with the immensely fuller knowledge of molecular physics, of protoplasm, and of brain function, acquired in the years since Darwin wrote, have sufficed to place these questions on a much more secure basis. But the collection of facts made by him, and the suggestive remarks he everywhere makes, render his book of permanent value. ...
— Life of Charles Darwin • G. T. (George Thomas) Bettany

... in every essential respect, in the same way. Whether one considers those creatures of microscopic size living in stagnant ponds, or man himself, it is found that certain qualities characterize them all. That minute mass of jelly-like substance known as protoplasm, constituting the one-celled animal amoeba, may be described as ingestive, digestive, secretory, excretory, assimilative, respiratory, irritable, contractile, and reproductive: that is to say, the amoeba must take in food; must digest it, or change its form; must produce ...
— Voice Production in Singing and Speaking - Based on Scientific Principles (Fourth Edition, Revised and Enlarged) • Wesley Mills

... With some, as the common amoeba (Fig. 8), a minute little form that is to be found in the slime at the bottom of almost any body of water, the life-history is extremely simple. The organism itself consists of a minute particle of protoplasm, a single cell with no definite shape or body-wall and no specialized organs or apparatus for carrying on the life-functions. It lives in the slime or ooze in fresh or salt water, takes its food by simply flowing over the particle that is to ...
— Insects and Diseases - A Popular Account of the Way in Which Insects may Spread - or Cause some of our Common Diseases • Rennie W. Doane

... of note (for he was a lover of style), collected in the first instance for the help of an irregular memory, were becoming, in the quaintly labelled drawers, with labels of wise old maxim or device, the primary, rude stuff, or "protoplasm," of his intended work, and already gave token of its scope and variety. "All motion discovers us"; if to others, so also to ourselves. Movement, rapid movement of some kind, a ride, the hasty survey of a shelf of books, best of all a conversation like this morning's ...
— Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance • Walter Horatio Pater

... since the beginning of life on this planet, have been employed to build up the human body in its present form. Embryology has shown us that, during gestation, each human embryo is a replica of the past; it passes through the different Imago stages from protoplasm to man, being unrecognisable at certain stages from a monad, an amoeba, a fish with gills, a lizard, and a monkey with a tail and dense clothing of hair over the whole body. The human embryo has also, at an early stage, ...
— Science and the Infinite - or Through a Window in the Blank Wall • Sydney T. Klein

... doom of matter establishes the conclusion that matter, slime, or protoplasm never originated in the immortal Mind, and is therefore not 279:9 eternal. Matter is neither created by Mind nor for the manifestation ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy

... that is nil, but whether we ourselves possess the intellectual elements which will ever enable us to grapple with the ultimate structural energies of nature. [Footnote: 'In using the expression "one sort of living substance" I must guard against being supposed to mean that any kind of living protoplasm is homogeneous. Hyaline though it may appear, we are not at present able to assign any limit to its complexity of structure.'—Burdon Sanderson, in the 'British Medical Journal,' January 16, 1875. We have here scientific insight, and ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall

... shape, the lovely creature. She had no intelligence, the divine soul. But she was the greatest bit of protoplasm in any galaxy you could name. By our standards, I probably might be called handsome. I was young and healthy. I had all of my genes and chromosomes. My color was the dirty green that is ...
— Lonesome Hearts • Russell Robert Winterbotham

... the higher nerve-centres in the surface of the cerebrum, near to which consciousness resides, but not in sufficient force to arouse consciousness. When, however, the attention was excited by my second address, it perceived the first faint impulse which had been registered upon the protoplasm of the nerve-centres, although unfelt. Probably most of my readers have had a similar experience. A word spoken, but not consciously heard, has a moment afterward been detected by an effort as distinctly conscious as that made by the man who is attempting to ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various

... imagination. When William Thomson tries to place the ultimate particles of matter between his compass points, and to apply to them a scale of millimetres, he is powerfully aided by this faculty. And in much that has been recently said about protoplasm and life, we have the outgoings of the imagination guided and controlled by the known analogies of science. In fact, without this power, our knowledge of Nature would be a mere tabulation of coexistences and sequences. We ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman

... matter, the individual cells, as will be explained later, seem physically and even chemically mere duplicates of one another. They may not all be of the same size; but they are all composed of protoplasm, and the protoplasm of plants cannot be distinguished from that of animals by any physical or chemical tests known to modern science. The protoplasm in the brain of a bird is the same as that in its toes; and no metaphysical subtilties ...
— Q. E. D., or New Light on the Doctrine of Creation • George McCready Price

... in the same way again about even the most trivial things since I have learned all about Protoplasm and — and — well, all these marvelous ...
— Hermione and Her Little Group of Serious Thinkers • Don Marquis



Words linked to "Protoplasm" :   platelet, substance, plasm, karyoplasm, nucleoplasm, cytol, germ plasm, blood platelet, living substance, cytoplasm



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