Half Hours With Modern Scientists: Lectures and Essays — John Shaqi
Half Hours With Modern Scientists: Lectures and EssaysTyndall, John
Philosophy
Half Hours With Modern Scientists: Lectures and Essays
Tyndall, John
Science
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,
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