there are in nutritive assimilation itself two distinct acts. The one consisting of the manufacture of reserve-stuff is the more obvious but the less specific; the other, really essential, is assimilation properly so-called, the reconstitution of the protoplasm. The former is indispensable to the production of the most prominent acts of vitality—movement, secretion, production of heat. If it is suspended, functional activity is arrested. We get apparent death, or latent life. But if the real assimilation is arrested, we have real death.
According to this there would be a fundamental distinction between real and apparent death. The former would be characterized by an arrest of the protoplasmic assimilation which is externally indicated by no sign. On the other hand, apparent death would be characterized by the arrest of the formation and destruction of reserve-stuff. It would be externally manifested by two signs:—The suppression of material exchanges with the medium (respiration, alimentation) and the suppression of the functional acts (production of movement, of heat, of electricity, of glandular excretion).
Such would be the most expedient test for apparent or real death. The question occurs in the case of grains of corn in Egyptian tombs, and also of hibernating animals and reviviscent beings, and, in general, in the case of what has been called the state of latent life. But from the practical point of view it is extremely difficult to apply this test and to decide if the phenomena which are arrested in the grain at maturity, in Leeuwenhoek's tardigrada,[1]
- ↑ Bear-animalcules, Sloth-animalcules. An order of Arachnida.—Tr.
