.8, DEATH. 437 



arrest of this process, an arrest causing in the first place a diminution 

 or cessation of absorption of fresh food — of more potential ; and in 

 the second, an increase in the heat waste, and consequent lowering in 

 the heat equivalents of the discharged products. This lowering may 

 be rapid, as where the cell tissues are rapidly oxydised in the air, or 

 it may be a slow process, gradually going on in the bodies of animals 

 or tissues of plants. But the essence of protoplasmic death is that 

 the self-feeding gear is disarranged, that the cell either stops taking 

 up more food, or that it uses up its food more quickly than it can 

 take it, and so burns itself away. 



In a complicated aggregate of cells, protoplasmic death of any 

 one of them must necessarily be reflected on the others in some 

 mechanical way, the simplicity of the path depending on the 

 simplicity of the cell aggregate. The suddenness or violence of the 

 interference will similarly depend on the degree of complexity of the 

 cell aggregate. In an organism like man the arrest of the cell 

 activity of the respiratory centre causes what is called sudden death 

 of the entire organism. But obviously the suddenness, as the death 

 itself, depends on the correlations between the organs — correlations 

 of clearly mechanical nature — and the death of the entire organism, 

 protoplasmic death of all the cells — comes only gradually, as the 

 destructive changes set going creep along the mechanical channels. 

 There is, of course, absolutely no reason why the skin of a man 

 killed by chloroform or gunshot should not succeed as a graft quite 

 as well as the skin from a living man, provided it were taken before 

 the ripples of nutritive and other disturbance had spread to it. The 

 tissues die slowly, and the time of death varies as the mechanical 

 relations. 



It is clear, then, that death of the organism, the death of the medical 

 books and the popular imagination, is a function, not of the organism 

 but of the complexity of the organism. It forms a mechanical middle 

 term between protoplasmic death of some of the tissues and proto- 

 plasmic death of all the tissues. We may distinguish this as somatic 

 death. 



Running down the animal kingdom from the more integrated to 

 the less integrated, we find somatic death gradually fading away till, 

 in the protozoa, there is no distinction between somatic death and 

 protoplasmic death. A shock that is fatal to civilised man is not 

 infrequently borne with comparative ease by savage man, and might 

 have little effect even on one of the higher mammalia. Brain 

 operations and accidents instantly fatal to man can be survived for 

 many days by pigeons, and the removal of great parts has little effect 

 on the life of an amphibian. 



Precisely the same condition of things can be inferred if we study 

 the results of artificial section, or the conditions of natural budding. 

 Bisection certainly would kill all the higher animals. In its natural 

 form it becomes an increasingly common form of reproduction, as we 



