150 Luck, or Cunning ? 
lightly—each carries to its extreme conceivable develop- 
ment that which in the other is only sketched in by a faint 
suggestion—but neither has any feature rigorously special 
to itself. Granted that death is a greater new departure 
in an organism’s life, than any since that congeries of births 
and deaths to which the name embryonic stages is com- 
monly given, still it is a new departure of the same essential 
character as any other—that is to say, though there be 
much new there is much, not to say more, old along with 
it. We shrink from it as from any other change to the un- 
known, and also perhaps from an instinctive sense that 
the fear of death is a sine gud non for physical and moral 
progress, but the fear is like all else in life, a substantial 
thing which, if its foundations be dug about, is found to 
rest on a superstitious basis. 
Where, and on what principle, are the dividing lines 
between living and non-living to be drawn? All attempts 
to draw them hitherto have ended in deadlock and disaster ; 
of this M. Vianna De Lima, in his “‘ Exposé Sommaire des 
Théories transformistes de Lamarck, Darwin, et Haeckel,’* 
says that all attempts to trace une ligne de démarcation 
nette et profonde entre la matiére vivante et la matiére inerte 
have broken down.{ Il y aun reste de vie dans le cadavre, 
says Diderot,{ speaking of the more gradual decay of the 
body after an easy natural death, than after a sudden and 
violent one; and so Buffon begins his first volume by 
saying that ‘“‘ we can descend, by almost imperceptible 
degrees, from the most perfect creature to the most form- 
less matter—from the most highly organised matter to the 
most entirely inorganic substance.’’§ 
Is the line to be so drawn as to admit any of the non- 
* Paris, Delagrave, 1886. t Page 60. 
t “‘ Buvres complétes,” tom. ix., p. 422. Paris, Garnier fréres, 
1875. 
§ ao Nat.,” tom.i., p. 13, 1749, quoted ‘“‘ Evol. Old and New,” 
p. 108. 
