48 FROM DUST TO DUST. 



made such rapid advance, and has shed so much light, that it may 

 be said to have illumined all other Sciences connected with life 

 upon our planet; to have elucidated some of the chief phenomena 

 of Agriculture ; and to have placed many of our manufacturing 

 industries, such as those of silk, wine, etc., upon a rational footing. 

 It furnishes us with many friends, as well as many foes, but happily 

 the former predominate. 



Nature seems not only anxious to produce, but to destroy. 

 There is a Shiva as well as a Vishnu, as the Hindu philosophy 

 teaches ; and it is probable that every animal and vegetable organ- 

 ism has a Shiva near at hand, when the scales, which Brahma 

 holds, trend their beam towards that side which points to the 

 setting of life's sun. The maintenance of the equilibrium between 

 the force which integrates and builds up, and that which disinte- 

 grates and pulls down, is the mystery of life ; its loss is the 

 mystery of death. Between these two forces lies the path of 

 progress and the way of endless evolution, the purpose of which 

 is the inscrutable secret. Life and death are equally necessary to 

 the fulfilment of that end for which the former was brought into 

 existence. Death is necessary for rejuvenescence of species and 

 progressive evolution ; according to Professor Weismann it is an 

 acquired characteristic of the Metazoa ; and the only acquired 

 character which he concedes to be hereditary.* Amongst unicel- 

 lular organisms — Protozoa and Protophyta — there is no natural 

 death, whilst the conditions favourable to their lives are present ; 

 they can multiply by fission, so that, as all the body material is 

 used up in the process, there is nothing left to die ; or, as Weis- 

 mann puts it, " There is no death because there is no corpse." 

 These Protozoa and Protophyta (or, as Haeckel calls them. Pro- 

 tista) produce in the Metazoa both life and death. 



. The origin of life in the eternal past, as well as the end of life 

 in the eternal future, is sealed to us ; it is not, however, beyond 

 the aim of students of Biology to study the only eternal that our 

 finite sense is capable of understanding — the Eternal Present — 

 and to see how the wheel of life revolves. 



* In a letter from Professor Weismann, dated August 21, 1894, he says : — 

 " You seem to believe that I take death for an acquired character, but death 

 is certainly not a somatogenous character, but a blastogenous one. So there is 

 no doubt that it must be transmitted," etc.— J. S. T. 



