Note 233

Apart from specifically oriented and "differential-diagnostically" evaluated experiments concerning nervous conduction, we cannot indicate a  direct  method demonstrating continuous chemical bonding. All experiments that one may, with respect to this question, device on macro-molecular non-living material, and whose conclusions one wants to apply to the living substance, can only be applied to a denaturated and therefore not-living-anymore substrate. In the known denaturational structures, which generally are fine fibrillar, we undoubtedly have a correlative representation of living substance before us, but we do not have the key for clarification. When we attempt, on our own, to give a clarification, then it always is fairly unequivocallly in line with a continuous chemical bonding-chain. Denaturation along this chain results in the fibrillar structure of the substrate of denaturation.

On the other hand, double-refraction phenomena in alleged living protoplasmic substance bear witness to directional orientation which one can hardly interpret otherwise than equidirectionally oriented fibrillar structure. A genuine bonding continuum one cannot in this way distinguish from a parallel direction of unbonded short chains having a sideways shift with respect to one another. And, finally, one also doesn't know whether the shift doesn't come from inserted substances instead of from the protoplasmatic matrix.
Radiolarian skeletons (tests) [radiolaria are marine planktonically living unicellular creatures] should, apart from the statically functional significance [of the skeleton], be seen as imprints of certain plasmatic structures (which have secreted these skeletons), and thus not as something identical with plasmatic substance, but a kindred form impression of intracellular substructure. Similar forms are often also encountered in pollen grains [also unicellular objects]. They should, however, not be confused with superficially similar forms of many plant parts (for instance seeds) which are multicellularly constituted and which are the result of an entirely different development, although also here there are remote relationships to the above.

So direct demonstration of Unimol is difficult, for everything one analytically works on are fragments, and every physical and chemical method of determination necessarily results in fragments, without resulting in any independent establishment of original bondings. Because we know the fragments already for a long time, almost always the (false) conclusion presses itself forward that precisely these "fragments", and nothing else, were actually there. The proof must, for the time being, be done indirectly from the special interpretation of facts that shows a preponderance with respect to some other rational interpretation, and from the preponderance of consequences that also allow to clarify "strange" and side-line phenomena. A discussion of the concepts "molecule" and "chemical bond" also provides surprisingly much. We are sure that in the end also truly experimental proofs will be given. Possibly they are already there, but unknown to us.

For the time being we must, in every relevant case, focus on  indirect  methods, for example the mentioned comparison of performance of the simple homogeneous nervous stimulus conduction as also of the complex conduction through the so-called reflex-arch, within a continuous bonding-system as also [conduction] in a "medium" (pure-system). Similar considerations must depart from chemically oriented fine- and micro-anatomy.

When we consider any histological detail, then it is impossible for us to say where and how bonding-chains can be. We characteristically do not have the ability to distinguish with certainty between  genuine  living substance and "functional-only" support substance, backup substance, etc. Of extreme cases of secretions, bones, cartilage, tendons, etc., we know, but also here there are transitions and inclusions. The prototype of living substance is, for example, the fertilized egg-cell in the process of beginning fission.

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