The Intimate Causes of Old Age. 215 



tremendous significance. It opened vistas of great hopes. 

 For it was ah-eady recognized that unicellular life was the 

 basis of multicellular organisms. If, therefore, these 

 structui'al units of our bodies were deathless under nature, 

 the whole question of immortal life for man resolved itself 

 into one of proper care and husbandry, protection and 

 nutrition, of the physiological cell. Systems of such cell 

 husbandry began to be outlined for practical use ; and in 

 the minds of many, the " fond dream of all the human 

 ages " seemed to be on the eve of realization. The hope 

 was logical, the deduction legitimate, if these premises 

 concerning the natural deathlessness of the unicells were 

 true. 



Prof. August Weissmann — whose theories of life and 

 death are now common property throughout the world — 

 made the natural immortality of unicellular life one of the 

 foundation stones of his famous hypothesis ; other German 

 histologists concurred, as also several noted English 

 biologists ; and for ten years we really seemed to be at the 

 bottom of the great problem of life on the earth. It was 

 then more logical to argue that the attacks of disease 

 bacteria, acute and chronic, might be the ultimate cause 

 of old-aging. For we contemplated the human organism 

 — the soma — as composed of cells, not essentially unlike 

 unicells, and originally derived from them ; and if these 

 component cells were deathless unless crushed by violence, 

 starved, suffocated, or otherwise killed, the problem of 



