248 FROM COMTE TO BENJAMIN KIDD PART IV 



plasm exists at all in continuity, it is hardly necessary 

 to argue that the same thing must be true of it. Part 

 of the germ plasm builds up a body, and undergoes 

 in somatic form the doom of death ; part of the germ 

 plasm survives as germ plasm, multiplying and re- 

 plenishing itself (if only during embryonic growth), 

 and ultimately in some fortunate fragments pass- 

 ing into new lives. This thing need never die. 

 Most of it will die; what is transformed into body, 

 and what fails of attaining to fertilisation. But it 

 need not die ; it is potentially immortal. So to say, 

 the old original germ plasm may hand on the duty of 

 building up a body to some of the more newly formed 

 material, and, evading the chances of death, may 

 refuse to quit the parental tissues till the moment of 

 fertile sexual intercourse. It is potentially immortal ; 

 practically, by the law of chances, it will be both 

 mortal and short-lived. If pollen grains depend on 

 the wind or depend on insects for doing their work, 

 how much potentially immortal " germ plasm " must 

 die in the history of every dioecious plant ! 



Unicellular creatures, however, are immortal, ac- 

 cording to Weismann, rather qua non-sexual than 

 qua unicellular. Sex and death are somehow corre- 

 lated ; he believes that he has proved this by show- 

 ing a general correspondence between the age at 

 which species produce offspring and their natural 

 term of life. This view of Weismann 's is widely ac- 

 cepted. A correlation between the fact of sex and the 

 habit of dying a natural death is largely admitted. 



Death, then, as a natural and certain event, arose 

 with sex, or in consequence of it. But how did sex 

 originate ? Romanes asserts a self-contradiction in 



