When the brain dies it is resolved in the ordinary way gradually, or may be resolved in a laboratory quickly, into its constituents, which the chemist may collect as water, carbonic acid and so forth, together with, roughly, a few pinches of ash. Nothing is lost of what, as we say, it was made of. After death it is left to fall from its temporary high estate of power, and travel along the line of least physical and chemical resistance to the low estate from which life had raised its matter-stuff. Material necessity, such as we picture it, then resumes its sway; physical laws, that is, let us say, established physical habits, dominate once more. But this brain, while human life employed and profited by it, was in vital and structural continuity with the first life-jelly that appeared upon the earth. You may trace, in the pictorial scientific way, all its many cells to the germ-cell or egg from which the whole body sprang. Again, and in the same manner, you may trace this germ-cell, this egg, to another from which it was derived. Some scientific men will tell you that in every developing egg, during the very first stages of its division, cells are set apart as germ-cells to continue the race in the next generation. There runs, they will say, through the generations of men a continuous underground river-system of protoplasm, a continuous streaming of cells from which are thrown up at intervals jets, as it were, of living material which become individual lives. Or we may put it that as in certain plants there is a creeping root-stock hidden underground and giving origin here and there to new specimens of the plant, so there is (according to this opinion) a root-stock of germinative material passing on and giving rise to body after body, through all mankind. The source of this branching, interlacing germ-structure is in the beginnings of the world, and the beginnings of the world are—where? In the ether, the physicist may say. In the place and state from whence my elements have come, the chemist says. At present we, studying in these pages, are content to say that whatever the scientific details may be, the pathway of life that we see is one, from wherever the chemist and the physicist allow of a beginning to the place where both must own themselves confounded, the brain of man.