The commonwealth of cells : $b Some popular essays on human physiologySpurrell, H. G. F. (Herbert George Flaxman)
Science
The commonwealth of cells : $b Some popular essays on human physiology
Spurrell, H. G. F. (Herbert George Flaxman)
Human physiology
Given a cell, it is necessary to keep that cell under favourable
conditions. Otherwise the unstable protoplasm breaks up. It must have
the elements necessary to keep up its cycle of changes in the proper
form, which we may now call food, and many cells have to go and find this
requisite. It must keep away from injurious influences, and it must race
other cells for localities favourable to its growth and multiplication;
in fact, the cell must work.
That a cell can, in virtue of its chemical affinities alone, move about,
seeking favourable conditions, showing discrimination and doing work,
seems incomprehensible. In the first place, how can it move? There is
only one way: it must effect a redistribution of its substance, and
contrive that those parts of the cell whose activity is applied to this
end shall be so situated as to produce definite changes in its shape
according to the cause which evokes them. Of the way in which different
cells move we shall have a good deal more to say later.
Why protoplasm should be influenced to move still requires explanation.
Yet the gap between protoplasm and other substances is really not so
great, after all. Heat and magnetism cause movement in inanimate matter,
and the response of protoplasm as exemplified by some of the minute
unicellular animals is almost as mechanical. Some kinds which swim in
water move to the positive pole of a galvanic battery, others to the
negative, if the wires are dipped into the vessel containing them. Some
move towards light, others away from it, with unvarying regularity.
Temperature and chemical substances also cause a definite effect upon
these micro-organisms. And all these movements are wholly involuntary,
absolutely invariable, and, in fact, reactions evoked by fixed causes.
Nevertheless, it will be seen that protoplasm can only continue to exist
in the form of a cell, since, unless thus organized, it can neither
keep itself among favourable surroundings nor prepare fresh ingredients
to make good its waste. If a cell be cut up into several pieces, these
detached bits of protoplasm will live for a time; but death overtakes
them as soon as they have used up their reserve material. When this is
gone, they have to consume their own substance, a process which quickly
proves fatal. Should a fragment contain a small part of the nucleus cut
away with it, it will live a little longer; but it is only the piece
which contains the nucleus more or less intact—in other words, the cell,
damaged though it be—which can survive and recover from such mutilation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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