LIFE AND DEATH. 115 



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 1 that definite 

 arrest which involves the impossibility of any revival. De- 

 composition 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 inseparably connected with that of death, 

 and I believe that I was right in distinguishing between the division 

 of an Infusorian 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 Infusoria 2 . The 

 real proof of death is that the organized substance 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 altera- 

 tion to the lower, or whether the corresponding phenomena 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 ' homogeneous substance,' and are 

 resolved into a germ, from which, by a process of development, 

 a new individual of the same species once more arises. The 

 division of the contents of the cyst, viz. its multiplication, is, 

 according to this view, of secondary importance, and the essential 



1 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. 

 3 See below. 



I 2, 



