a great affinity for oxygen. It absorbs it so greedily that the gas cannot remain in a free state in its neighbourhood. Living protoplasm, therefore, exercises a reducing power. But it does not absorb oxygen in this way for its own advantage; oxygen is not absorbed, as was supposed thirty years ago, to supply fuel wherewith to burn the protoplasm. The products are not those of its oxidation, of its own disintegration. They are the products of combustion of the reserve-stuff which is incorporated in it. These substances have been supplied to it from without, like the oxygen itself, with the blood. This was proved by G. Pflüger in 1872 to 1876. The protoplasm is only the focus, the scene, or the factor of combustion. It is not its victim, it does not itself furnish the fuel. It works like the chemist, who obtains a reaction with the substances that are given to him.
As for the reducing power of protoplasm, A. Gautier in 1881 and Ehrlich in 1890 have given fresh proofs. A. Gautier in particular has insisted that the phenomena of combustion take place, so to speak, outside the cell, and at the expense of the products which surround it; while on the contrary the really active and living parts of the nucleus and of the cellular body, work protected by the oxygen, as in the case of anaerobic microbes.
This result is of great importance. Burdon Sanderson, the late learned professor of physiology at the University of Oxford, has not hesitated to compare it to the discovery of respiratory combustion by Lavoisier. There is no doubt some exaggeration in the comparison; but there is, on the other hand, no less exaggeration in supposing that it is not of great
