Note 225 — Chapter IV · ON THE INTERNAL FORM AND STRUCTURE OF THE CELL

Whence the name “mitosis” (Greek μίτος, a thread), applied first by Flemming to the whole phenomenon. Kollmann (Biol. Centralbl. II, p. 107, 1882) called it divisio per fila, or divisio laqueis implicata. Many of the earlier students, such as Van Beneden (Rech. sur la maturation de l’œuf, Arch. de Biol. IV, 1883), and Hermann (Zur Lehre v. d. Entstehung d. karyokinetischen Spindel, Arch. f. mikrosk. Anat. XXXVII, 1891) thought they recognised actual muscular threads, drawing the nuclear material asunder towards the respective foci or poles; and some such view was long maintained by other writers, Boveri, Heidenhain, Flemming, R. Hertwig, and many more. In fact, the existence of contractile threads, or the ascription to the spindle rather than to the poles or centrosomes of the active forces concerned in nuclear division, formed the main tenet of all those who declined to go beyond the “contractile properties of protoplasm” for an explanation of the phenomenon. (Cf. also J. W. Jenkinson, Q. J. M. S. XLVIII, p. 471, 1904.)