The Intimate' Causes of Old Age. 211 



ascends from the tissue cells to the seed, and is thus trans- 

 ferred from plant to plant and year to year. 



Why does the poppy live ? It lives to express its life, 

 its personal life, and to take its personal satisfaction from 

 living. It is an organized effort at fruition on the part of 

 sentient matter. Seed is its mode of escaping death. We 

 have radically to change this former conception. 



But granting the general truth of the doctrine that seed 

 and death result primarily from the hard conditions of 

 terrestrial life, which make it impossible for metazoons to 

 live on continuously and deathlessly, it has been argued 

 that all existent forms of life have fallen irretrievably into 

 this mode of living and dying. Not only do the same 

 conditions of hardship and limitation still prevail which 

 first induced seed and death, but every plant and animal 

 lives by virtue of, and in accord with, a plan or an 

 arrangement of the germinal matter in the seed, which 

 compels it to unfold as did the parent, and inevitably 

 produce seed and die. 



That is to say, the arrangement of the protoplasmic 

 molecules in the germ, seed, or ovum, is such that the 

 successive growths of tissue must, if the plant or animal 

 is to live at all, succeed each other according to the order 

 of their arrangement or garnering in the germ. 



In the main, this view must be conceded to be upheld 

 by the facts. Heredity does thus hold all forms of life 

 within its iron clutch. Plants and the lower orders of 



