Newark evening star and Newark advertiser., 1915-05-06
HEALTH AND HAPPINESS
Cells-What They Are and What They
May Tell.
BY DIR. LEONARD KEENE mRsHBERG
a. B., NJ A, NJ. D. (John Hopkins).

! CelIs-What They Are and What They
! May Tell.
! What is a cell?" was a question
recently asked at a seminary meet
| ing OF several hundred persons.
"A place to put prisoners, "a hole
| in which bees store honey "a hole
in the ground" the holes in the
brain for thoughts" "apertures in the
human body"-these and many more
incorrect and far fetched replies
were made. Perhaps my friend the
reader can give with staunch onEic-
tion what she or he considers true
answer. Yet all of the above re-
sponded with equal certainty-and
were wrong.
The Roman or Latin name cell
meant a reservoir. a filled space, a
storeroom, a storway or stocked
compartment That is still the cor
rect meaning. Anything empty, full
of air, untitled a vacuum, a hole, an
opening, is not cell. A cell in the
true sense of the word is not made
for honey, for prisoners, for anything.
1t is not a cell unless it is chock-a-
bloc and fully saturated with stuff,
be 1t living or inanimate.
Cell Defined.
A brain cell Is not an aperture, a
hole, a vacuum. 1t is the living tissue
units themselves. A liver cell is not
a hole: the cells of the blood, the kid
neys, the stomach and the spleen are
not empty areas interviewer like
threads in lace. Even honeycomb is
not empty walls filled with honey. 1t
is the checkered octagons of honey
themselves.
In a word, cells are stuff, not non
sense. They are the visible units of
vitality in living creatures. Alive or
at an end of their existence they are
the anatomical and physiological
visible units of life stuff
To be sure, you cannot see the cells
of the skin, nerves, brain, bone and
other tissues with the unaided eye.
Many of them are a thousand times
smaller than the limits Of naked Vis-
ion.
1t must, however, always be kept
firmly fixed in memory that a cell is
not a wall enclosed space, but the
living things themselves. A flake Of
dandruff, scale from the skin, a
drop of blood may contain several
hundred thousand of such units or
cells-With not a pore or open wall
anywhere.
A cell is the smallest unit of life
SLuII-SO-td1lSu pIOtOplehSiii ttn hAiN-
tomical or microscopic appearance
shows a billowy sea OF rolling jelly
with little bobbing, pitching shell
OF a submarine in it called nucleus.
A cell may be ulti-miniature of a
globe or an ovoid or founder, but in
its midst will be found an even more
minute globule of thicker jelly, with
a complicated structure. This is the
nucleus in the plasm.
What Cells Tell.
You may picture a living cell to
yourself as a hens egg squeezed
down so small that a drop will hold
$50. 900 of them-red blood cells are
this small, but differ from all other
cells in being without the nucleus.
The yolk of the egg may then be
thought of as the nucleus and the
white as the plasm.
Unluckily, the analogy stops at
once, because the yolk of a hens egg
ia for the most part golden fat, while
the nucleus of cells is a most potent
and complicated structure. From It's
meshes are unfolded all sorts of COM
MEX and hereditary matters.
Moreover, the cells of the sex glands
of most creatures contain actually in
| their nucleus-the nucleus itself has
little ultra microscopic rods called