234 LIFE AND DEATH. 



moisture which supply the first impulse. In other 

 words, the organization proper to the manifestation of 

 life remains, but there is no life. The so-called 

 arrested life is not a life. 



It must be said, however, that the majority of 

 physiologists refuse to accept this interpretation. 

 They believe in an attenuation of the nutritive 

 synthesis and not in its complete destruction. They 

 think that this total suppression would be contrary 

 to current ideas relative to the perpetuity of the 

 protoplasm and the limited duration of the living 

 element. The natural medium is variable, and even 

 the mineral cannot remain eternally fixed. Still less 

 is perennity a property of the living being. If 

 ordinary life is for each individual of limited duration, 

 the arrested life must also be of limited duration. 

 We cannot believe that after an indefinitely prolonged 

 sleep the grain of corn, or the paste-eel, or the 

 colpoda, emerging from their torpor can resume their 

 existence, like the Sleeping Beauty, at the point at 

 which it was interrupted, and thus pass with a bound, 

 as it were, through the centuries. 



In fact the maintenance of the vitality of grains 

 of corn from the Egyptian tombs and their aptitude 

 to germinate after thousands of years are only fables 

 or the result of imposture. Maspero, in a letter 

 addressed to M. E. Griffon on the isth July 1901, 

 has clearly summed up the situation by saying that 

 the grains of corn bought from the fellahs almost 

 always germinate, but that this is never the case with 

 those that the experimenter himself takes from the 

 tombs. 



To sum up, we must use the same language of 

 nutrition and of life, of their uninterrupted progress, 



