7 o 
Is Death Universal ? 
[February, 
psychological laws as the mother, although each for its own 
individuality. The young individuals ingest nutriment, and 
transform it into their own bodily substance. Thereby they 
not merely replace the losses indispensable to vital work, 
but they accumulate also an excess of bodily substance in 
virtue of which they grow. When they have become as 
large as their mother, and are resolved into two offshoots, 
each of these inherits at most one-fourth of the vital mass 
of its grandmother. In the third fission each offshoot 
receives at most one-eighth, in the fourth one-sixteenth, and 
in the tenth at most i-i024th of the ancestral body with 
which we started. We have here not taken into account 
the losses from decomposition which the ancestral substance 
must have undergone in all generations, since in the Proto- 
zoa one and the same bodily mass which is concerned in 
reproductions fulfils all other bodily functions. The Proto- 
zoa, consisting of one plastide only, possess no working 
plastides along with the reproductive plastides of the 
Metazoa. Subsequent generations of Protozoa consist, 
therefore, more and more of bodily substance which they 
have individually elaborated, and less and less of ancestral 
constituents. 
The individualisation of the daughter offshoots begins 
with the first stages of fission in the mother. These stages 
are the unfelt and unconscious state of the separation and 
transformation or re-formation of organs before these are 
capable of receiving and utilising external impressions. 
This unconscious state gradually passes into the condition 
of sensibility and consciousness as soon as external im- 
pressions are received by special organs. Special sensations 
must be induced, even in the Protozoa, by contact with 
foreign bodies, by changes of temperature, by the ingestion 
of food, by changes of the form and the locality of the body, 
by the recognition of fellow-individuals, &c. 
The Protozoa are, like the Metazoa, to be regarded as 
psychically centralised individuals. In the severed psychic 
centres of the offshoots the former psychic centre of the 
mother cannot persist, because her individual bodily and 
spiritual life is extinguished in fission. The Protozoa can 
therefore, from a psychological point of view, not be regarded 
as immortal. 
It may here be contended that the author is assuming too 
much. There is every reason to suppose that the offshoots 
must inherit impressions made upon the mother, since each 
of them must inherit a part of her psychic centre. 
In the stalked Protozoa, also, such as Zooihamnium , 
