functionally active grow, and those which do not act become atrophied. We are only expressing the facts when we say that the organic destructions that go on in the living being (whether at the expense of its reserve-stuff or at the expense of its medium, or whether it be even slightly at the expense of the plastic substance itself) are the antecedent, the inciting agent or the normal condition of the chemical and organogenic syntheses which create the new protoplasm.
On the other hand, we are wrong if we hold with Le Dantec that instead of two chemical operations there is only one, that which creates the new protoplasm. The obvious destruction is neglected; it is deliberately passed over. He does not see that it is necessary to liberate the energy employed in the construction, by complication, of this highly complex substance which is the new protoplasm. He really seems to have made up his mind not to analyze the phenomenon. If we decline to admit that to the first act of functional destruction succeeds a second, assimilation or organogenic synthesis, we are looking at elementary beings, in which the succession cannot be grasped, as we look on brewers' yeast. We not only mean that the morphogenic assimilation results from the functional activity; we mean that it results from it directly, immediately, that it is the functional activity itself. Experiment tells us nothing of all this. It shows us the real facts, the facts of the destruction of an organic immediate principle, the sugar, and the fact that an assimilating synthesis is the correlative of this destruction. Besides, if it is impossible in examples of this kind to exhibit the succession, it is perfectly easy in beings of a higher order. It is, then, clearly seen that the preliminary
