Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 3.djvu/291

Rh Denmark speaks to Horatio, mark the extreme limits of the transformation of matter. In any case the beings of lowest order that toil and engender in the bosom of putrefaction are really absorbing and storing away life, since without their aid the corpse could not serve as nutriment to plants, which in their turn are the necessary reservoir whence animality draws its sap and strength. It is in this sense that Buffon's doctrine of organic molecules is a true one.

Death is the necessary end of all organic existence. We may hope more or less to set at a distance its inevitable hour, but it would be madness to dream of its indefinite postponement in any species whatsoever. No doubt there is no contradiction in conceiving of a perfect equilibrium between assimilation and disassimilation, such that the system would be maintained in immortal health. In any case, no one has yet even gained a glimpse of the modes of realizing such an equilibrium, and death continues, till further orders, a fixed law of Fate. Still, though immortality for a complete organism seems chimerical, perhaps it is not the same with the immortality of a separate organ in the sense we now explain. We have already alluded to the experiments of M. Paul Bert on animal-grafting. He has proved that, on the head of a rat, certain organs of the same animal—as the tail, for instance—may be grafted. And this physiologist asks himself the question, whether it would not be possible, when a rat provided with such an appendage draws near the close of his existence, to remove the appendage from him, and transplant it to a young animal, which in his turn would be deprived of the ornament in the same way in his old age in favor of some specimen of a new generation, and so on in succession. This tail, transplanted in regular course to young animals, and imbibing at each transference blood full of vitality, perpetually renewed, yet ever remaining the same, would thus escape death. The experiment, delicate and difficult, as we well see, was yet undertaken by M. Bert, but circumstances did not allow it to be prolonged for any considerable time, and the fact of the perpetuity of an organ, periodically rejuvenated, remains to be demonstrated.

Real death, then, is characterized by the positive ceasing of vital properties and functions both in the organic or vegetative life, and in the animal life, properly so termed. When animal life disappears without any interruption occurring in organic life, the system is in a state of seeming death. In this state the body is possessed by profound sleep quite similar to that of hibernating animals; all the usual expressions and all signs of internal activity have disappeared, and give place to invincible torpor. The most powerful chemical stimulants exert no control over the organs, the walls of the chest are motionless; in short, seeing the body presenting this appearance, it is impossible not to think of it as dead. There are quite numerous states of the