Page:Life and death (1911).djvu/338

 turgescence, fragmentation of the protoplasm, the formation of granules, and the appearance of vacuoles.

Chemical Changes.—O. Loew and Bokorny laid great stress in 1886 and 1896 on the chemical changes. The living protoplasm according to them is an unstable proteid compound. A slight change would detach from the albuminoid molecule a nucleus with the function of aldehyde, and at the same time would transform an amido-group into an amido-group. This would suffice for the transition of the protoplasm from the living to the dead state. This theory is based on the fact that the compounds which exercise a toxic action on the living cell, without acting chemically on the dead albumin, are easily fixed by the aldehydes; and on the fact that many of them, which attack simultaneously the living albuminoids and the dead albumin, easily combine with the amido-group.

E. Pflüger, a celebrated German scientist, has considered living matter as an albumin spontaneously decomposable, the essential nucleus of which is formed by cyanogen. Its active instability would be due to the penetration into the molecule of the oxygen which fixes on the carbon and separates it from the nitrogen. Armand Gautier has not confirmed this view. Duclaux (1898) has stated that the difference between the living and the dead albumin would be of a stereochemical order.

''Progressive Character of Death. Accidental Death.''—We have seen that in general the disappearance of the characteristics of vitality is not instantaneous, at least in the natural course of things, in complex organisms. It is the end of a more or less rapid process. But death is not instantaneous in the isolated anatomical element any more than it is in the protozoan or