Let us compare a few dates:  In 1612, Galileo and Kepler were still living.  Thirty years were yet to lapse before the birth of Newton.  Modern astronomy was in its tenderest infancy, and remained the privilege of a few initiated persons.—­C.E.  Guillaume, in La Nature.

* * * * *

[MIND.]

THE UNDYING GERM PLASM AND THE IMMORTAL SOUL.

By Dr. R. VON LENDENFELD.

[The following article appeared originally, last year, in the German scientific monthly, Humboldt.  It, is reproduced here (by permission)—­the English from the hand of Mr. A.E.  Shipley—­as a specimen of the kind of general speculation to which modern biology is giving rise.—­EDITOR.]

To Weismann is due the credit of transforming those vague ideas on the immortality of the germ plasma which have been for some time in the minds of many scientific men, myself among the number, into a clear and sharply-defined theory, against the accuracy of which no doubt can be raised either from the theoretical or from the empirical standpoint.  This theory, defined as it is by Weismann, has but recently come before us, and some time must elapse before all the consequences which it entails will be evident.  But there is one direction which I have for some time followed, and indeed began to think out long before Weismann’s remarkable work showed the importance of this matter.  I mean the origin of the conception of the immortal soul.

Before I approach the solution of this problem, it may be advisable to recall in a few words to my readers the theory of the immortality of the germ plasm.

All unicellular beings, such as the protozoa and the simpler algae, fungi, etc., reproduce themselves by means of simple fission.  The mother organism may split into two similar halves, as the amoeba does, or, as is more common in the lowest unicellular plants, it may divide into a great number of small spores.  In these processes it often happens that the whole body of the mother, the entire cell, may resolve itself into two or more children; at times, however, a small portion of the mother cell remains unused.  This remnant, in the spore-forming unicellular plants represented by the cell wall, is then naturally dead.

From this it follows that these unicellular beings are immortal.  The mother cell divides, the daughter cells resulting from the first division repeat the process, the third generation does the same, and so on.  At each division the mother cell renews its youth and multiplies, without ever dying.

External circumstances can, of course, at any moment bring about the death of these unicellular organisms, and in reality almost every series of beings which originate from one another in this way is interrupted by death.  Some, however, persist.  From the first appearance of living organisms on our planet till to-day, several such series—­at the very least certainly one—­have persisted.