This impropriety may be yet more manifest by another quotation from Haeckel. His aim is to endeavour by the use of vague language to reduce the impassable gulf between the living and the not-living, and he writes of the animal _ovum_, as ‘a little lump of albumen in which another albuminous body is enclosed—the nucleus.’ What profound trifling is this! Think of, say a human ovum, an invisible particle less than the hundredth of an inch in diameter; it _lives_; and there lies coiled up in the mystery of its minuteness all the potentiality of the highest manhood; all the possible power of Socrates, or Homer, or Goethe. Is that simply ‘a lump of albumen’? Not unless a man can be justly described as such, by the bottles of chemical substances to which his body can be reduced. Even Mr. Spencer pleads that ‘the lowest living things are not, properly speaking, organisms at all, for they have no distinctions of parts, no traces of organization.’ If it were true that our lenses cannot reveal organization in the lowliest and smallest organisms, does it follow that there _is_ none? Will Mr. Spencer risk the validity of the doctrine of material atoms on the ability of our lenses to show the atom? Surely not. But the affirmation is not supported by facts. The splendid increase of microscopical lens power during the past decade has not only enabled us to see that there is complexity and structure in both the animal and vegetable cell, which bisects by an elaborate process; but even the minute nucleus of the minutest organisms, often not more than one tenth part of the infinitesimal body itself, is now proved to undergo profound structural changes, which precede all the great cyclic changes of the organism as a whole. The nucleus is the centre, in fact, of all the higher activities of the least and lowest infusoria; and is the centre of most delicate but clearly demonstrable structural changes.[18] [Footnote 18: _Jour. Roy. Micro. Soc._, President’s Address, 1886.]