The romance of the human body / by Ronald Campbell Macfie.

  • Macfie, Ronald Campbell, 1867-1931
Date:
1919
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The romance of the human body / by Ronald Campbell Macfie. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    7366 tons, and in a few days might grow to a mass as big as the moon. Pasteur once declared that he could cover a surface of wine, equal in extent to the floor of the hall in which he was speaking, with the Mycoderma aceti, in the space of twenty-four hours, simply by sowing minute specks here and there; and Punnett bred in a year sixty- seven generations of rotifers averaging thirty a generation, and calculated that if he had been able to rear all the animals, he would have had ‘a solid sphere of organic matter greater than the probable limits of the known universe In the case of unicellular organisms, there seems no end to reduplication. For hundreds of thousands of years life has been on the earth, and all the uni- cellular organisms now known are progeny of the divisions of the original cells. Billions and billions of cells must have been formed, and there is no reason to doubt that the process may go on for hundreds of thousands of years yet. A material with such power of unending self-propagation seems in a sense immortal, and a great German scientist speaks of ‘the immortality of the germ- plasm.’ Further, an American scientist, Alexis Carrel, has lately shown that even after one of the higher multicellular organisms is dead, the cells of his body may be kept living, and may be induced to multiply indefinitely if preserved in suitable nutrient solutions. In the case of the higher multicellular organisms, division seems to stop when the organism is full- grown, or at least soon after the change called death; but it does not really necessarily stop, for male and female give rise in life to little individual b