77. If therefore we cannot restrict Life to the processes of Nutrition, Dr. Beale’s hypothesis, whatever value it may have as explaining histogenesis, is quite unacceptable. Neither Vital Force nor Bioplasm covers the whole ground. For the former there is no better evidence than our ignorance of the real synthesis; for the latter the evidence is positive in its nature, but its interpretation is questionable. Dr. Beale selects as the germinal matter those portions of tissue which are susceptible of being deeply stained by the carmine solution, the formed material being only stained in a faint degree; the nucleus and nucleolus are the portions of germinal matter which are most deeply stained; and hence he concludes that the older the matter the fainter will be its coloration. There is no dispute as to the value of the staining process, invented by Gerlach, for the discrimination of chemically different parts of a tissue; and Dr. Beale has made excellent use of it in his researches.[28] But I altogether dispute the conclusion that the staining process reveals the parts which are exclusively vital; and for this reason: it depends solely on the acid reaction of those parts; and we cannot divorce the acid from the alkaline agencies, both being indispensable. Nay, it has been proved that in the _living animal_ no organized substance can be stained. Lord Godolphin Osborne first discovered, in 1856, that the protoplasm of growing wheat was susceptible of coloration;[29] but Gerlach, in 1858, found that this never took place in the _animal_ during life. He kept tadpoles and intestinal worms for weeks in colored fluids, without a single spot becoming stained; although no sooner did these animals die than the staining began. Nor even when he injected the colored fluids under the skin and into the stomach, was the slightest coloration produced.[30] To Gerlach’s testimony may be added that of Stein, who, in his magnificent work on _Infusoria_, says that not only has no foreign substance ever been found in the protoplasm of the _Opalina_, but in the _Acineta_, and all the embryos of the higher Infusoria known to him, he has been unable to color the living substance.[31] This resistance of the living protoplasm is surely a serious objection to the hypothesis that only those parts of the dead organism which are stained were the truly vital parts. Ranke sums up the results of his experiments thus: “They all show that the living cell resists the imbibition of every substance which it cannot assimilate. It is precisely the impossibility of staining the cell that proves this conclusively, since every particle of carmine absorbed would have revealed its presence.”