moisture which supply the first impulse. In other words, the organization proper to the manifestation of life remains, but there is no life. The so-called arrested life is not a life.
It must be said, however, that the majority of physiologists refuse to accept this interpretation. They believe in an attenuation of the nutritive synthesis and not in its complete destruction. They think that this total suppression would be contrary to current ideas relative to the perpetuity of the protoplasm and the limited duration of the living element. The natural medium is variable, and even the mineral cannot remain eternally fixed. Still less is perennity a property of the living being. If ordinary life is for each individual of limited duration, the arrested life must also be of limited duration. We cannot believe that after an indefinitely prolonged sleep the grain of corn, or the paste-eel, or the colpoda, emerging from their torpor can resume their existence, like the Sleeping Beauty, at the point at which it was interrupted, and thus pass with a bound, as it were, through the centuries.
In fact the maintenance of the vitality of grains of corn from the Egyptian tombs and their aptitude to germinate after thousands of years are only fables or the result of imposture. Maspero, in a letter addressed to M. E. Griffon on the 15th July 1901, has clearly summed up the situation by saying that the grains of corn bought from the fellahs almost always germinate, but that this is never the case with those that the experimenter himself takes from the tombs.
To sum up, we must use the same language of nutrition and of life, of their uninterrupted progress,
