IX] 



THE DYNxVMICS OF LIFE. 105 



■aus- 

 1- 

 tions. 



matter and energy, which are transformed into forms that 

 are no longer capable of remaining in the organism. These 

 relations of the organism to matter and energy constitute, 

 I believe, the differentia of life ; and death consists in Death 

 the organism losing that peculiar power of controlling the 

 action of the chemical and physical forces in virtue of 

 which it transforms and assimilates matter and energy. 



When death has taken place — or, in other words, when followed_ 

 the controlling vital principle has ceased to act — the ^J^^ra"" 

 chemical forces begin to act according to their own ordi- fo™3,- 

 nary laws, and decay or putrefaction may result, as cir- 

 cumstances determine. In many cases, indeed, where 

 death takes place slowly, a change of the nature of putres- 

 cence begins before life is extinct.^ It would be altogether chemical 

 inaccurate to say that the action of the vital principle ''^^^^^^ 

 during life suspends the action of the ordinary chemical life, 

 forces ; on the contrary, the process of oxidation, causing 

 the transformation of organic compounds into inorganic 

 ones, probably goes on more rapidly in the body of a 

 warm-blooded animal during life than it does in the same 

 during the process of decay after death. But of course 

 the waste is balanced by assimilation of food in the living 

 animal, and not in the dead one. Vitality, I say, does 

 not suspend, but directs and controls, the actions of the 

 physical and chemical forces, producing results through 

 them which they could not have produced of themselves. 



I have already stated that I believe organisms have a 

 relation to energy, parallel to their relation to matter. We 

 have seen that as a result of death the chemical forces, 

 being freed from vital control, act according to their own 

 ordinary laws, and effect the transformation of the organic 

 chemical compounds into inorganic ones. In a similar Transfor- 

 way, death, as I believe, effects a transformation of vital ^^^^"^ °' 

 energy into some ordinary inorganic form of energy. I energy in 

 have mentioned an instance in which the vital energy 

 appears to have been transformed into heat in the act of 

 dyhag. But its transformation into motor energy is perhaps 

 a commoner case. This is, I believe, the rationale of those 

 1 See Carpenter's Human Physiology, p. 57. 



