III.] LIFE AND DEATH. II5 



organism, so that it would be lost labour to insert a clause in our 

 definition of death which would include this phenomenon. The 

 same objection might be raised if the transplantation took place 

 a day or even a year before the death of the cock. 



Gotte is decidedly in error when he considers that the idea 

 of death merely expresses an 'arrest of the sum of vital 

 actions in the individual,' without at the same time including 

 that definite arrest which involves the impossibility of any 

 revival. Decomposition is not quite essential to our definition, 

 inasmuch as death may be followed by drying-up ^, or by 

 perpetual entombment in Siberian ice (as in the well-known 

 case of the mammoth), or by digestion in the stomach of a 

 beast of prey. But the notion of a dead body is indeed in- 

 separably connected with that of death, and I believe that 

 I was right in distinguishing between the division of an In- 

 fusorian into two daughter-cells, and the death of a Metazoon, 

 which leaves offspring behind it, by calling attention to the 

 absence of a dead body in the process of fission among In- 

 fusoria'^. The real proof of death is that the organized sub- 

 stance which previously gave rise to the phenomena of life, 

 for ever ceases to originate such phenomena. This, and 

 this alone, is what mankind has hitherto understood by death, 

 and we must start from this definition if we wish to retain 

 a firm basis for our considerations. 



We must now consider whether this definition, derived from 

 observation of higher animals, may be also applied without 

 alteration to the lower, or whether the corresponding phe- 

 nomena which arise in these latter, differ in detail from those 

 of the higher animals, so that a narrower limitation of the 

 above definition is rendered necessary. 



Gotte believes the process of encystment which takes place 

 in so many unicellular animals (Monoplastides) to be the 

 analogue of death. According to this authority, the individuals 

 in question not only undergo a kind of winter sleep — a period 

 of latent life— but when surrounded by the cyst they lose 

 their former specific organization ; they become a ' homoge- 

 neous substance,' and are resolved into a germ, from which, 



* As in the case of the bodies of monks on the Great St. Bernard, or 

 the dried-up bodies in the well-known Capuchine Monastery at Palermo. 

 ^ See below, 



I 2 



