The organic vision of Hélan Jaworski

ee to variations in the atmosphere: dryness tightens the fibres of their cysts and dampness slackens them, until the double action causes the cyst to burst and project the spores into space like ripe seeds. Like a faint remembrance of the time when they were free in the forest, the myxomycetes of our bodies react to changes of temperature, and when the weather is damp make their presence felt by seasonal rheumatic pains.

The correspondence between groups or colonies of cells in space and the cellular formations of the organs of the body can be carried a little further if we study the bone cells. In bone the protoplasm of the cell is surrounded by a capsular envelope which is united to other cells of the same system by filamentous prolongations. The cells are arranged around a central canal—the Haversian canal. This formation recalls the Heliozoa and the Radiolaria, precursors of the starfish and the sea urchin.

In one type of Radiolaria all the individual cells are at the periphery and the central cavity contains a liquid jelly like the gelatinous jelly of the embryonic bone. This jelly often contains drops of oil like the greasy yellow bone marrow. Also in the clear zone of the Radiolaria’s protoplasm are little yellow parasitic algae which carry oxygen to the animal. Their origin is unknown but they are always present in a constant and fixed number. The bone cell, on the other hand, has the oxygen-carrying red blood corpuscle produced by the bone marrow and fulfilling the same function as the algae.

The amoebocytes of the blood, the connective tissue, the cartilaginous and bone cells, the cartilage and bone itself, are not isolated and independent formations, but, allowing for adaptations due to interiorisation, represent the synthesis of the corresponding groups which live free in the sea and on the land. Perhaps they are only their continuation.

Interiorisation not only presides over the formation of all animal organisms but directs their growth. The individual cells and colonies that go to make up an organism undertake special functions for the benefit of the whole. In doing so they lose many of their individual properties, but only those no longer necessary in a communal life. The cell is not blind—the whole organism sees for it. All are related in the realization of a common function

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