304 NATURE AND LIFE. 
transformations from'small to great, and vice versa. In 
other words, Leibnitz sees everywhere eternal and incor- 
ruptible germs of life, which neither perish at all nor be- 
gin. What does begin and perish is the organic machine 
of which these germs compose the original activity: the 
elementary gearing of the machine is broken apart, but 
not destroyed. This is the first view held by Leibnitz. He 
has another, too, conceiving of generation as a progress of 
life through degrees; he can conceive of death also as a 
gradual regress of the same principle, that is to say, that 
in death life withdraws little by little, just as it came for- 
ward little by little in generation. Death is no sudden 
phenomenon, nor instantaneous evanishing—it is a slow 
operation, a “ retrogradation,” as the Hanoverian philoso- 
pher phrases it. When death shows to us, it has been a 
long time wearing away the organism, though we have not 
perceived it, because “ dissolution at first attacks parts in- 
visibly small.” Yes, death, before it betrays itself to the 
eye by livid pallor, to the touch by marble coldness, before 
chaining the movements and stiffening the blood of the 
dying person, creeps with insidious secrecy into the small- 
est and most hidden points of his organs and his humors. 
Here it begins to corrupt the fluids, to disorganize the 
tissues, to destroy the equipoise and endanger the harmony. 
This process is more or less lingering and deceitful, and, 
when we note the manifest signs of death, we may be sure 
that the work lacked no deliberate preparation. 
These ideas of Leibnitz, like most of the conceptions 
of genius, waited long after the time of their appearance 
for confirmation by demonstrative experiment. Before his 
day, bodies were dissected only for the sake of studying 
in them the conformation and normal arrangement of the 
organs.. When this study was once completed, science 
took up the methodical inquiry into the changes produced 
in the different parts of the body by diseases. Not until 
