 Accordingly, some supporters of protoplasm sought to dislodge the cell as a basic living unit. The botanist Julius Sachs (1892), for example, asserted “to call the protoplasm unit a cell was about as appropriate as calling a live bee in a honeycomb a cell” (as translated by Welch &amp; Clegg 2010: C1281). Since protoplasm appears as a viscous substance that is only artificially constrained by cell boundaries, some protoplasm theorists viewed it as supplanting the cell as an organizing unit. Where Schwann understood the cell to be the fundamental unit of biological development, protoplasm theorists understood protoplasm to drive ontogeny and cells to be merely secondary structures deposited in the course of this primary substance’s development. Recently a few biologists (Welch &amp; Clegg 2010, 2012) and philosophers (Nicholson, 2010) have argued for reviving protoplasm theory. Their argument is that protoplasm theory presents a more holistic systems or organismal perspective. (We discuss holism and organicism in  Section 3.)