Word: protoplasmic
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...Clouds of Time. The Emperor Hirohito's millennial origins were lost in the clouds of time. In the beginning, say the Japanese history books, Heaven & Earth were one, a primal protoplasm drifting in the void like a jellyfish on water. Then the Universe took form. On the Plain of High Heaven the first gods appeared. The Sky Father, Izanagi, stood upon the Rainbow Bridge to Earth and dipped his jeweled spear into the sea. The drops that fell, as he withdrew the blade, congealed into the Japanese archipelago...
Elisabet was sustained by an appealing cast of minor eccentrics. She would never admit that she had married Edmund Montgomery, bastard of a Scottish baron, lifelong searcher for the mainspring of life in the pullulations of protoplasm. All his life he called her "Miss Ney." In his silence, his patience, his courage, his poetic nobility, he emerges as almost a saint. Crescentia ("Cencie") Simath, the maidservant, was apparently paralyzed with love for Edmund and endured, if possible, even more than he did. Lorne, the son, was a tragic, horrifying product of idealism crossed with rampant mother love...
...that he had produced a greater wonder: motherless tadpoles. He removed the nucleus from a frog's egg at the moment of fertilization, but before it could unite with the nucleus of the male sperm. This made the mother's contribution apparently a mere anonymous drop of protoplasm with no inheritable characteristics, while the sperm alone contributed a share of genes...
...only produced a tadpole, but a tadpole which showed some characteristics of its mother. The obvious and significant conclusion: The intricate mechanism of embryonic development is not determined by genes alone, as most geneticists have thought, but depends on the whole protoplasm of the egg cell...
Diatoms are the grass of the waters-the major source of energy and sustenance for marine life. A few thousandths of an inch across, the diatom's jewel-like silica case encloses a drop of protoplasm. In it chlorophyll magically manufactures organic matter out of sunlight, carbon dioxide and water. As this photosynthesis proceeds, diatoms multiply by splitting. Though each diatom is invisible, they outweigh in volume and importance all other sea plants combined, including seaweeds which grow as big as oaks...