132 LIFE AND DEATH. 



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 con- 

 sequence 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 reproduction 

 are, in Gotte's sense, universally fatal ; that reproduction 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 superstructure 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 collection 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 

 reproductive material that is, as true reproduction ; and since, ac- 

 cording to Gotte's view, the formation of germs is always inti- 

 mately 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 necessary 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 men- 

 tioned with regard to insects. ' Rejuvenescence,' bound up as it is 

 with encystment and reproduction, is, according to Gotte, 'a re- 

 coining of the specific protoplasm, by means of which the identity 

 of its substance is fixed by heredity,' a 'marvellous process in which 

 phenomena the most important in the whole life of the animal, 

 and in fact of all organisms reproduction and death have their 

 roots ' (1. c., p. 81). Whether such re-coining really takes place or 

 not, at any rate I claim to have shown above that it does not cor- 

 respond with death in the Metazoa, and if it is represented at all 

 in these latter that it ought to be looked for in the reproductive 



