32 THE LIVING WORLD. 



ment. The directive power which seems to exist is 

 no directive power at all, but only a property of 

 protoplasm. Just as it is the property of platinum 

 sponge to cause, when held in a current of hydro- 

 gen, the hydrogen to unite with oxygen and burn, 

 so it is the property of protoplasm to cause more 

 complicated oxidations to take place, which produce 

 the fundamental process of growth, and from this, 

 as we have seen, other vital activities easily follow. 

 We see, therefore, that the comparison of the body 

 with the machine plus its engineer is replaced by 

 a machine that is purely automatic, and finds in its 

 own complex composition the conditions which 

 regulate its activities. Death, according to this 

 idea, is simply the destruction of protoplasm, which 

 would, of course, destroy its properties. Just as 

 soon as protoplasm begins to lose its complicated 

 structure, it loses all of the properties belonging to it 

 as protoplasm ; and this is death. Demagnetism of 

 a bar of steel is therefore strictly comparable to 

 death, the only difference being that it is possible to 

 cause the steel bar to resume its former molecular 

 arrangement and once more to possess its magnetic 

 properties. The possibility, however, does not exist 

 in living things; the violence of death ruins the 

 machine. Even a machine cannot be started if its 

 adjustments are broken, and a living body being 

 more complex than any machine has its harmonious 

 action more readily ruined. What is lost in death is, 

 therefore, not any directing force but chemical or 

 molecular composition. The dead body is to be 

 compared not with a machine which has lost its 



