CHAPTER VI. 

 DEATH. 



WHEN the animal kingdom is surveyed from a broad stand-point, it 

 becomes obvious that the ovum, or its correlative the spermatozoon, 

 is the goal of an individual existence : that life is a cycle beginning 

 in an ovum and coming round to an ovum again. The greater part 

 of the actions which, looking from a near point of view at the 

 higher animals alone, we are apt to consider as eminently the pur- 

 poses for which animals come into existence, when viewed from the 

 distant outlook whence the whole living world is surveyed, fade 

 away into the likeness of the mere byplay of ovum-bearing organ- 

 isms. The animal body is in reality a vehicle for ova ; and after 

 the life of the parent has become potentially renewed in the off- 

 spring, the body remains as a cast-off envelope whose future is but 

 to die. 



Were the animal frame not the complicated machine we have 

 seen it to be, death might come as a simple and gradual dissolution, 

 the 'sans everything' being the last stage of the successive loss of 

 fundamental powers. As it is, however, death is always more or 

 less violent; the machine comes to an end by reason of the disorder 

 caused by the breaking down of one of its parts. Life ceases not 

 because the molecular powers of the whole body slacken and are 

 lost, but because a weakness in one or other part of the machinery 

 throws its whole working out of gear. 



We have seen that the central factor of life is the circulation 

 of the blood, but we have also seen that blood is not only useless, 

 but injurious, unless it be duly oxygenated ; and we have further 

 seen that in the higher animals the oxygenation of the blood can 

 only be duly effected by means of the respiratory muscular mechan- 

 ism, presided over by the medulla oblongata. Thus the life of a 

 complex animal is, when reduced to a simple form, composed of 

 three factors ; the maintenance of the circulation, the access of air 

 to the haemoglobin of the blood, and the functional activity of the 



