In brief, there is nothing in life of which there are not germs, and, so to speak, harmonics in death, and nothing in death of which germs and harmonics may not be found in life. Each emphasizes what the other passes over most lightly—each carries to its extreme conceivable development that which in the other is only sketched in by a faint suggestion—but neither has any feature rigorously special to itself. Granted that death is a greater new departure in an organism’s life, than any since that _congeries_ of births and deaths to which the name embryonic stages is commonly given, still it is a new departure of the same essential character as any other—that is to say, though there be much new there is much, not to say more, old along with it. We shrink from it as from any other change to the unknown, and also perhaps from an instinctive sense that the fear of death is a _sine quâ non_ for physical and moral progress, but the fear is like all else in life, a substantial thing which, if its foundations be dug about, is found to rest on a superstitious basis. Where, and on what principle, are the dividing lines between living and non-living to be drawn? All attempts to draw them hitherto have ended in deadlock and disaster; of this M. Vianna De Lima, in his “Exposé Sommaire des Théories transformistes de Lamarck, Darwin, et Haeckel,” {150a} says that all attempts to trace _une ligne de démarcation nette et profonde entre la matière vivante et la matière inerte_ have broken down. {150b} _Il y a un reste de vie dans le cadavre_, says Diderot, {150c} speaking of the more gradual decay of the body after an easy natural death, than after a sudden and violent one; and so Buffon begins his first volume by saying that “we can descend, by almost imperceptible degrees, from the most perfect creature to the most formless matter—from the most highly organised matter to the most entirely inorganic substance.” {150d}