Again, while a living organism may be artificially divided into viable portions, no method seems known by which a series of separate cells may be, as it were, assembled or combined into one, of which a new unit may result from assemblage or combination. The more highly specialized or complex the cell, the more easily does it part with life, and the more difficult becomes its preservation and its reproduction. We may assume that after the death of a man his most specialized cells are the first to die, or more, that their death has perhaps preceded his own. In the ante-mortem collapse seen in many diseases and poisonings, has not this very thing occurred, i. e., that the patient has outlived his most important cells? Certainly when a patient dies of progressive gangrene he has outlived, perhaps, a large proportion of his millions of competent cells. Viewed properly, what a strange spectacle is here presented! Perhaps twenty per cent. of his cells actually dead, the rest bathed in more or less poisonous media, still their host endures yet a little while. "Behold, I show you a great mystery." About which of the poisoned cells does the flame of life still flicker? The life-giving germ-and sperm-cells may exist and persist for some time after the body dies, as numerous experiences and experiments have shown. Ova and spermatozoa do not die the instant the host dies. And herein appears another great mystery, that cells from the undoubtedly dead body may possess and unfold the potentialities of life when properly environed. Among the lower forms of life cells but slightly differentiated go on living and even creating new organisms, though the larger organisms be dead. Moreover, in what way shall we regard the division of one ameboid cell into two, equally alive and complete? Here two living organisms are made out of one, without death intervening, and by permutation alone may one calculate, through how few generations cells need pass in order to be numbered by millions, without a death necessary to the process. Thus far we have had in mind life and death in the animal kingdom alone. But most of what has been said, and much that has not, is equally true in the vegetable kingdom. Even in the mineral kingdom--as some think--the invariable and inevitable tendency to assume definite crystalline form represents the lowest type of life. Indeed it might fall in with Spencer's definition as evincing a tendency to adjust internal to external relations, though exhibited only after such ruthless disturbance as liquefaction by heat or solution. But then, is not every disturbance of relations "ruthless," because it follows inexorable habits of Nature? Even a crystal will reform as frequently as appear certain other phenomena of life, if made to do so. Were atoms alive they would suffer with every fresh chemical change, and who knows but that they do?