92 MAJOR W. McADAM ECCLES, M.S.^, M.B., F.R.C.S., R.A.M.C., ON 



Discussion. 



The Chairman : Major Eccles has raised in the title of his Paper 

 ^ most important question — a question which he certainly has 

 not answered. This is no reflection upon the lecturer, who well 

 knows that the ultimate " why " of anything can never be 

 answered scientifically ; and the question " Why we die ? " has never 

 been answered outside the Bible. I have a standard work on 

 " Death,'* by Carrington, of nearly 600 pages, in which it is shown 

 that the author asked the question " Why we die ? " of every scientist 

 he could refer to, from St. Petersburg to New York, and was himself 

 surprised at the entire lack of all knowledge on the subject. The 

 only suggestion he got was that perhaps we die from habit ! 



The problem, of course, is that in man, growth, when the anabolic 

 exceeds the katabolic, has a fixed period, say, of twenty-five years. 

 For, say, forty years, apart from accident or disease, there succeeds 

 a spell of adjustment between katabolism and anabolism — decay 

 and repair ; but after that, for some unknown reason, decay gradu- 

 ally exceeds repair and brings death. No scientific reason is known 

 for this. 



I speak here only of natural death. Major Eccles has shown 

 that the vast majority of deaths are not natural, but due to accident 

 or disease ; but in England one in nine, and in Ireland one in eleven, 

 still die of old age, which he calls " wearing out " — for which process 

 the lecturer has given no reason. To me it always seems that at 

 birth each individual receives a varying amount of life-force, according 

 to his heredity, and like a clock is constructed to last a certain time 

 and no longer. An eight-day clock will live eight days if no one 

 stops the pendulum, and a man will live out his days if no accident 

 or disease cuts them short. 



This unaccountable mystery, death, seems to prevail everywhere 

 over life, although indeed an interesting question has been raised as 

 to fishes. In them growth has no term, and inasmuch as the more 

 vital cartilage never hardens into the more mineral tooth, it is 

 stated that no death from old age has yet been recorded ; in other 

 words, there seems a possibility that natural death is unknown 

 amongst them. 



The fact, however, remains that outside Scripture, to the question 



