Potential Immortality 129 



plasm, still demonstrates by observable fact the continuity 

 of undying life. It is as if this egoplasm merely clothed and 

 armed itself with added organs and limbs and structures; 

 with their functions, abilities and desires; putting them on 

 for its better maintenance, and casting them off when they 

 are old and worn out, and making new ones so that it enjoys 

 perpetual youth. Indeed this expression, seemingly roman- 

 tic, is the best description findable of the very fact. In 

 all animals this life plasm is the ego; the essence of being, 

 and the essential of reproduction. Whether the process be 

 complicated by sex or not, the germplasm growing and 

 subdividing, and growing still, issues from the old physical 

 structure from time to time, carrying only the smallest frac- 

 tional abstract or fragment of its hereditary structure 

 needed for the new start or the change; and proceeds to 

 build by its inherited powers, a similar structure for itself; 

 new and young and oftentimes better than the old. In some 

 forms of life the issue of the germ from the old body is the 

 end of the use of that old body; the parts of the divided cells 

 which remain being abandoned at once with the deserted 

 structure, as we see in many plants, and some animals, when 

 reproduction is the final and exhausting effort of the individ- 

 ual life of the somatic body. But in the life where repro- 

 duction is frequent, and in those forms in which it is sexual, 

 there is the same continuity of life; although the undying 

 substance, the germplasm, continues its life partly in the 

 parent body and partly in that of the offspring; there is the 

 same discarding of the old structure and making of a new. 

 The new maybe is begun and is built to a nearly complete 

 condition within the old, as is the mammalian offspring 



