III.] LIFE AND DEATH. 1 33 



dififerent times. In obtaining evidence for ' the fatal influence 

 of reproduction,' is it possible to point to every case of sudden 

 death after the act of oviposition or fertilization ? These cases 

 occur among many of the higher animals, especially in Insects, 

 and were collected by me in an earlier work^ It is obvious 

 that such cases are exceptional, but in a restricted sense it is 

 quite true, as far as these individual instances are concerned, 

 that death appears as a consequence of reproduction. The 

 male bee, which invariably dies while pairing, is undoubtedly 

 killed in consequence of a very powerful nervous shock ; and 

 the female Psychid, which has laid all her eggs at once, dies of 

 ' exhaustion ' — however we may attempt to explain the term on 

 physiological principles. 



Can we conclude from these cases that the effects of repro- 

 duction are, in Gotte's sense, universally fatal ; that reproduc- 

 tion is the positive and ' exclusive explanation of natural death '? 

 (1. c, p. 32.) I need not linger over these isolated examples, 

 but I turn at once to the foundation of the whole conclusion — a 

 foundation which is obviously unable to support the super- 

 structure erected on it. Gotte formally derives the idea that 

 death is a necessary condition of reproduction, from a very 

 heterogeneous collection of facts. When we examine this col- 

 lection we find that the process which is taken to be death is 

 not the same thing in all these instances, while the same is true 

 of the influence of reproduction by which death is supposed 

 to be caused. The whole conception arises out of the process 

 of encystment, which is regarded as the building-up of repro- 

 ductive material — that is, as true reproduction ; and since, 

 according to Gotte's view, the formation of germs is always 

 intimately connected with an arrest of life, and since, by his 

 own definition, this stand-still of life is equivalent to death, it 

 follows that, with such a theory, reproduction, in its essential 

 nature, must be inseparably connected with death. It is neces- 

 sary at this juncture to remember what Gotte means by the 

 process of rejuvenescence, and to point out that he is dealing 

 with something quite different from 'the fatal influence of 

 reproduction,' which was just now mentioned with regard to 

 insects. ' Rejuvenescence,' bound up as it is with encystment 

 and reproduction, is, according to Gotte, 'a re-coining of the 



* ' Dauer des Lebens ; ' translated as the first essay in this v^olume. 



