ground, where he fainted with alarm. The sol- | more right to her than the claimant who interred dier must have been a disciple of the laughter- her alive; but the doctrine being new to a court loving Roderick Random, who counterfeited death of law, the prudent pair anticipated the decision on his recovery from a fever, and snapped at the by returning to England, where they finally terfingers of the surgeon as he was closing his eyes.minated their adventures. The plot and morality But the more valorous son of Mars had nearly of the story are thoroughly characteristic of M. carried the jest too far, when he suffered his jugu- Fontenelle's nation, and the simplicity which belar vein to be opened before "he played out the lieves it is not less so of himself. The countryplay." Zadig, in Voltaire's story, pretends to be men of Shakspeare will recognize a French verdead, to test the affection of his wife; and his sion of Romeo and Juliet. All ladies are not friend, who is in the plot, applies immediately for blessed with resurrectionist lovers, but covetousthe vacant post, and feigns a pain in his side, ness will sometimes do the work of chivalry. A which nothing can cure except the application of domestic visited his mistress in her tomb, enticed a dead man's nose. But when the widow, deem- by a diamond ring, which resisting his efforts to ing that a living lover is worth more than a de- draw it off, he proceeded to amputate the finger. parted husband, advances to the coffin with an Thereupon the mistress revives, and the domestic open razor to take possession of the specific, Zadig drops down dead with alarm: " Thus," says M. is wise enough to cover his nose with one hand, Fontenelle, "death had his prey; it was only the while he thrusts the instrument aside with the victim which was changed." He gives further on other. A man of war, who had the good fortune a simple story, in which the lady with the ring to recover in a dissecting-room without the aid of was supposed to have died in childbirth, and some the knife, seeing himself surrounded, on opening grave-diggers were the thieves. In the hurry of his eyes, by mutilated bodies, exclaimed, I per- their flight they left a lantern which served to ceive that the action has been hot." And if M. light the lady to her door. "Who's there?" inFontenelle had opened his eyes, he might easily quired the girl who answered her knock. "Your have perceived that the anecdote was a jest. In- mistress," was the reply. The servant needed to deed, such is his credulity, that the story of a hear no more; she rushed into the room where surgeon addicted to cards, whose death had been her master was sitting, and informed him that the tested by bawling in his ears, rising up when a spirit of his wife was at the door. He rebuked friend whispered in the language of piquet," a the girl for her folly, and assured her that her misquint, fourteen and the point,” has been mistaken tress was in Abraham's bosom; but on looking by him for an extraordinary case of resuscitation, out of the window, the well-known voice exinstead of a common-place joke on the passion for claimed, " For pity's sake, open the door. Do play. The jest-book has always contributed abun-you forget that I have just been confined, and that dant materials to the compilers of horrors. Sev-cold in my condition would be fatal?" This was eral anecdotes turn on that inexhaustible theme not the doubt which troubled his mind, nor was it for merriment the sorrows of matrimony. In passing through the street a bier was struck against the corner of a house, and the corpse reanimated by the shock. Some years afterwards, when the woman died in good earnest, her husband called to the bearers, " Pray, gentlemen, be careful in turning the corners." Thus there is not even a step from the mirthful to the terrible.clared to have been the scene of the incident of The stories, unaltered, do double duty. Two Parisian merchants, bound together in close friendship, had one a son and the other a daughter, who were friends and something more. The daughter, compelled by her parents to sacrifice her lover for a wealthy suitor, fell into what M. Fontenelle calls an "hysterical syncope," and was buried. Fortune frowns upon lovers that she may enhance the value of her smiles. A strange instinct induced her dorer to disinter the body, and he had the doub e pleasure of delivering the fair one from a horrible death and a hateful husband. Holding that the interment had broken the marriage-tie, they fled to England, but at the end of ten years ventured back to Paris, where the lady was met by the original husband, who, noways surprised that she should have revisited the earth, nor staggered by her denials, laid a formal claim to her in a court of justice. The lover boldly sustained that he who rescued her from death, had the first observation we should have expected a wife to address to her husband, when, newly released from her grave by an almost miraculous deliverance, she suddenly appeared before him in the dead of night wearing the habiliments of the tomb. But as the husband was satisfied, it is not for us to be critical. Numerous places are de the ring, which M. Fontenelle considers to be cumulative testimony to its truth. We should have thought, on the contrary, that his faith would have been diminished as the stories increased. Marvels rarely go in flocks. In the present instance, few need to be told that M. Fontenelle has been drawing upon the standard literature of the nursery-that the ring-story is one of those with which children, from time immemorial, have been terrified and amused. "The nurse's legends are for truth received," and to the inventions which entertained their infancy, many are indebted for their after apprehensions lest the fate at which they shuddered in another should prove prophetic of their own. M. Fontenelle has himself thought that it would help out his subject to insert the poem of a M. Lesguillon, in which he relates from imagination the burial and resurrection of a lady who was set free, at the crisis of her despair, by the accident of a sexton cleaving her coffin with his spade. What calls forth M. Fontenelle's posing addition of being sanctioned by a philosospecial admiration is, that the author has "wed-pher and printed in a book. There was a French ded reason to rhyme," and it is impossible to deny captain in the reign of Charles IX. who used to that there is as much reason in M. Lesguillon's sign himself "François de Civile-thrice dead, verse as in M. Fontenelle's prose. thrice buried, and by the grace of God thrice reAs a set-off to the miserable mortals who lost stored." The testimony seems striking; as he their lives through a seeming death, this very ap- himself related his history to Misson the traveller, pearance is affirmed to have been the means of either Civile was a liar, say our authors, or the averting the reality. Tallemant has a story of a story is true. But without taking much from the Baroness de Panat, who was choked by a fish- romance of his adventures, the details are fatal to bone, and duly buried for dead. Her servants, to the value of the precedent. His first burial, to get her jewels, disinterred her by night; and the begin with, occurred before he was born. His lady's maid, who bore her a grudge, struck her mother died when she was advanced in pregnancy in revenge several blows upon her neck. The during her husband's absence, and nobody, before malignity of the maid was the preservation of committing her body to the ground, thought of the mistress. Out flew the bone set free by the saving the child. His father's return prevented blows, and up rose the baroness to the discom- his going altogether out of the world before he fiture of her domestics. The retributive justice had come into it—and here was concluded the first was complete, and the only objection to the nar- act of the death, burial, and restoration of Franrative is that, like the fish-bone, it sticks in the çois de Civile. His next death was at the siege throat. In this particular the stories mostly of Rouen, in 1562, where he fell senseless, struck agree; a single anecdote comes recommended by by a ball, and some workmen, who were digging intrinsic probability, and is no less distinguished a trench, immediately threw a little mould upon from hearsay romances by the external authority; his body, which was burial the second. The serfor it is told by the famous Sydenham, a man who vant of Civile tried to find out his remains, with was not more an honor to his profession by his the intention to bestow on them a formal interment. skill than to his kind by his virtues. The faculty Returning from a fruitless search he caught sight of his day demonstrated, on principles derived from of a stretched-out arm, which he knew to be his abstract reasoning, that the small pox ought to master's by a diamond ring that glittered on the yield to a hot regimen; and, though patients died, hand, and the body, as he drew it forth, was visphysicians thought death under a philosophical ibly breathing. For some days life and death treatment, better than capricious and perverse waged an equal contest, and when life was winrecovery in defiance of rules. Sydenham, who ning, a party of the enemy, the town having been reformed the whole system of medicine by substi- taken, discovered him in bed, and threw him from tuting experience for speculation, and who, be- the window. He fell on a dung-heap, where they sides indicating the right road, was himself per-left him to perish, which he considered was death haps the nicest observer of the habits of disease and burial the third. Civile's case would never that ever lived, had early discovered that the anti- have been quoted on its own merits; the promdote was to be found at the other end of the ther-inence given it is entirely due to the imposing mometer. The science which saved the lives of the public was the torment of his own. He was assailed by the profession to the close of his days for being wiser than his generation, and among the facts by which he mildly and modestly defended his practice, he relates with evident satisfaction how a young man, at Bristol, was stewed by his physician into a seeming death, and afterwards recovered by a mere exposure to cold. The moment he appeared to expire, his attendants laid him out, leaving nothing upon his body except a sheet thrown lightly over it. No sooner had he escaped from the domain of art to the dominion of nature than he began to revive, and lived to vindicate Sydenham, to shame his opponents, and to prove that there are occasions in which the remedy against death is to seem to be dead. The ancient who originated the celebrated saying, "The physician that heals is death," never anticipated such a verification of his maxim. description which a passion for notoriety made him write after his name, and which still continues to arrest the imagination. He survived to have a fourth funeral, and we hope when he was finally laid in the earth that he did not verify a proverb, much in vogue in his day, that a sailor often wrecked gets drowned at last. More of our readers may recollect the story of the Spanish grandee, who was opened by the great anatomist, Vesalius, and his heart found beating, notwithstanding the havoc that had been made by the knife. The family of the nobleman, so runs the tale, complained to the Inquisition, and the Inquisition decided that in a physician with the skill of Vesalius such an error implied a crime. Philip II. employed his authority to procure a pardon, and with difficulty obtained that the sentence of death should be commuted into a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Hallam, whose epithets have almost a judicial authority, calls the accusation absurd, and The three examples, however, which the resur-absurd it may be proved on physiological grounds. rectionists consider their stronghold, yet remain to be told; and it must be confessed that many have lent them the weight of their authority who reject the mass of old wives' fables, though with the im But the whole story is an idle rumor written by somebody from Spain to Hubert Languet, after the death of Vesalius, to account for a journey which puzzled the public. Clusius, who was in Madrid at the time that Vesalius set out, and had his in- and the author of a text-book on legal medicine, formation from Tisenau, the president of the says that unless secured to the table they are often council of the Low Countries, the land of the heaved up and thrown to the ground. Frequently anatomist's birth and affections, has related the strangers, seeing the motions of the limbs, run to origin of the pilgrimage in a note on the history the keeper of the Morgue, and announce with horof De Thou, whose narrative, so far as it goes, ror that a person is alive. All bodies, sooner or agrees with his own. Hating the manners of the later, generate the gas in the grave, and it conSpaniards, pining for his native country, and stantly twists about the corpse, blows out the skin refused by Philip permission to return thither, till it rends with the distension, and sometimes Vesalius sickened with vexation, and vowed on bursts the coffin itself. When the gas explodes his recovery to travel to Jerusalem, less from any with a noise, imagination has converted it into an superstition of his own, than to obtain his release outcry or groan; the grave has been reopened; by an appeal to the superstition of the king. A the position of the body has confirmed the suspinewsmonger, ignorant of the motives of an action, cion, and the laceration been taken for evidence appeases the cravings of curiosity by invention; that the wretch had gnawed his flesh in the frenzy that the Inquisition should be at the bottom of the of despair. So many are the circumstances which business was, in the reign of Philip II., a too will occasionally concur to support a conclusion probable guess, and a pretext for its interference that is more unsubstantial than the fabric of a was devised out of the professional pursuits of dream. Violent and painful diseases, which kill the pilgrim. The original report soon acquired speedily, are favorable to the rapid formation of strength in its progress. The offence of Vesalius the gas; it may then exist two or three hours was shortly avouched to be neither accidental nor after death, and agitating the limbs gives rise to solitary, and by the time the story reached Burton, the idea that the dormant life is rousing itself up the author of the "Anatomy of Melancholy," it to another effort. Not unfrequently the food in assumed the form of a general assertion-" that the stomach is forced out through the mouth, and Vesalius was wont to cut men up alive." blood poured from the nose, or the opening in a vein where a victim of apoplexy has been attempted to be bled. Extreme mental distress has resulted from these fallacious symptoms, for where they occur it is commonly supposed that the former appearance of death was deceitful, and that recovery was possible if attendance had been at hand. The old superstition that a murdered body would send forth a bloody sweat in the murderer's presence, or bleed from the wound at his touch, must have had its origin in the same cause. The sweat, which has been repeatedly observed, is produced by the struggling gas driving out the fluids at the pores of the skin. Through a rare coinci The fabled end of the Spanish grandee is also asserted of the Abbé Prevost-the third vaunted example of simulated death. He had a stroke of apoplexy on a journey, and the mayor of the village ordered an immediate examination of the body. The anguish of the incision restored the abbé to a momentary consciousness, and he expired with a cry. No authority is given for the story, and, judging from the character of the other assertions, it would be natural to infer that there was none to give. But if it be indeed a genuine fact among the fables, it proves nothing except the criminal haste of the village mayor, and the criminal heedlessness of the village practitioner-dence it may possibly have occurred during the vices which, in connection with death, are for the period that the assassin was confronted with the most part opposed to the feelings, the prudence, corpse; and the ordeal of the touch, in compressand therefore to the usage of mankind. No per- ing the veins, would have a direct effect in deterfect security can be devised against wilful care- mining a flow of blood from the wound, where it lessness any more than against wilful murder; chanced that the current, by the impulse of the but because a friendless traveller fell a victim to gas, was nearly ready to break forth. A latitude the rashness of an ignorant surgeon, there is no would not fail to be allowed to the experiment. occasion to fright the world from their propriety, | If at any time afterwards the body sweated or bled, and endeavor to persuade them that, with the best intentions, the living are liable to be confounded with the dead, to be packed sleeping in a coffin, and stifled waking in a grave. it would never have been doubted that it was prompted by the presence of the murderer, though the manifestation was delayed. One success bears out many failures, for failures imply the absence of notable incidents, and having nothing to arrest attention are quickly forgotten, while the wonders of a success take hold of the mind and live in the memory. In the midst of exaggeration and invention there was one undoubted circumstance which formerly excited the worst apprehensions-the fact that bodies were often found turned in their coffins, and the grave clothes disarranged. But what was as- The generation of gas in the body, with all its cribed, with seeming reason, to the throes of vital-consequences, was thoroughly understood when M. ity, is now known to be due to the agency of cor- Fontenelle wrote, but whatever could weaken his ruption. A gas is developed in the decaying body case is systematically suppressed. Nor is there which mimics by its mechanical force many of the in the whole of his book one single case bearing movements of life. So powerful is this gas in out his position that is attested by a name of the corpses which have lain long in the water, that M. slightest reputation, or for which much better auDevergie, the physician to the Morgue at Paris, thority could be found than the Greek manuscript Lend me a looking-glass; was dead :- in the handwriting of Solomon, found by a peasant | Lear brings in Cordelia dead, he exclaims :while digging potatoes at the foot of Mount Lebanon. It is no unreasonable scepticism to assume that the majority of the persons revived had never even lived. Yet not only is this book still in And immediately afterwards he adds, This feather vogue, but the French newspapers annually mul-stirs: she lives! The same test which led Lear tiply these tales to an extent which would be to the fallacious inference that Cordelia lived, infrightful if they were not refuted by their very duced Prince Henry to infer falsely that his father number. An English country editor in want of a paragraph proclaims that a bird of passage has been shot out of season, that an apple-tree has blossomed in October, or that a poor woman has added to her family from three to half a dozen children at a birth, and by the latest advices was doing well. But we are tame and prosaic in our insular tastes. Our agreeable neighbors require a stronger stimulus, and therefore endless changes are rung upon the theme of living men buried, and dead men brought to life again. Shakspeare, who, it is evident from numerous passages in his dramas, had watched by many a dying bed with the same interest and sagacity that he bestowed upon those who were playing their part in the busy world, has summed up the more obvious characteristics of death in the description the Friar gives to Juliet of the effects of the draught, which is to transform her into the temporary likeness of a corpse : No pulse shall keep His natural progress, but surcease to beat; By these gates of breath There lies a downy feather, which stirs not: Nor were these methods merely popular; they Colonel Townshend, described as a gentleman of great honor and integrity," was in a dying state. One morning he informed his physicians, Dr. Cheyne and Dr. Baynard, and his apothecary, Mr. Skrine, that he had found for some time “he could expire when he pleased, and by an effort come to life again." He composed himself for the trial, while one felt his pulse, another his heart, and the third applied a looking-glass to his Gradually the pulse ceased to beat, the Shall stiff, and stark, and cold appear, like Death. These are the ordinary signs by which death has always been distinguished; and it would be as reasonable to seek hot water beneath cold ice," as to look for any remnant of vitality beneath so inanimate an exterior. The cessation of breathing, in the opinion of Sir Benjamin Brodie-and no opinion, from his natural acuteness, his philosoph-mouth. ical habits, and his vast experience, can be more heart to throb, the breath to stain the mirror, until entitled to weight-is alone a decisive test of the extinction of life, and a test as palpable to sense in the application as it is sure in the result. "The movements," he says, "of respiration cannot be overlooked by any one who does not choose to overlook them, and the heart never continues to act more than four or five minutes after respiration has ceased." The ancient distinction of the heart was to be "primum vivens, ultimum moriens,"the first to live, the last to die and a Commission of the French Academy, who lately made a report on the subject, admit that when there is a considerable pause in its pulsations, it is impossible for life to be lurking in the body. But as the heart can only beat for a brief space unless the lungs play, and as common observers can detect the latter more readily than the former, the termination of the breathing is the usual and safe criterion of death. To ascertain with precision whether it had completely stopped, it was formerly the custom to apply a feather or a mirror to the lips. When the nicest scrutiny could discover no indication that he lived. Thus he continued for half an hour; his physicians believing that he had carried the experiment too far, and was dead beyond recall, when life returned, as it had receded, by gradual steps. It was at nine o'clock in the morning that the trial was made, and at six in the evening Colonel Townshend was a corpse. The post-mortem examination did nothing towards clearing up the mystery. His only disorder was a cancer of the right kidney, which accounted for his death, without accounting for his singular power of suspending at will the functions of life. Many boldly cut the knot they are not able to untie, and maintain that there was an action of heart and lungs which the physicians wanted the skill to perceive. The narrative of Cheyne leaves an opening for criticism; but let it be considered that he was a man of eminence, that all three attendants were professional persons, accustomed to mark and estimate symptoms, that their attention was aroused to the utmost by previous notice, and medicine, relates the anecdote as if he was satisthat they had half an hour to conduct their obser- fied of its truth, and the fate which one has narvations; and it must at least be acknowledged rowly missed it is not impossible may have overthat the signs which escaped them were too ob- taken others. But even at sea, nothing short of scure to be a safe criterion for the world at large. the grossest negligence could occasion the calamYet whatever may be its other physiological bear-ity; and for negligence, we repeat, there is no ings, it is no exception to the rule that life and effectual cure. breath are, for the purposes of sepulture, convert- The ceasing to breathe is not the only criterion ible terms. Without attaching importance to a of death antecedent to corruption. There is a principal peculiarity of the case, that it required second token specified by Shakspeare, and familan effort of the will to bring Colonel Townshend iar to every village nurse, which is quite concluinto the state, and that by an effort of the will he sive-the gradual transition from suppleness to could bring himself out of it, he was unable, after rigidity. The first effect of death is relaxation of all, to prolong the period of suspended, or appa- the muscles. The lower jaw usually drops, the rently suspended, animation beyond a single half limbs hang heavily, the joints are flexible, and hour; and in order to his being buried alive, he the flesh soft. The opposite state of contraction must have been a party to the act, and prepared ensues; then the joints are stiff and the flesh firm, his funeral in advance. The assumption, indeed, and the body, lately yielding and pliant, becomes pervades M. Fontenelle's book, that everybody hard and unbending. The contraction commences wrongly supposed to be dead had a narrow escape in the muscles of the neck and trunk, appears of premature interment, though it has never been next in the upper extremities, then in the lower, long, in any instance that is known to be authen- and finally recedes in the same order in which it tic, before some outward sign attracted attention, came on. It begins on an average five or six unless death had merely slackened his pace, in-hours after death, and ordinarily continues from stead of turning aside his footsteps. Funerals, it sixteen to twenty-four. But the period both of is true, on the continent take place sooner than its appearance and duration are considerably varied with us. In Spain, if M. Fontenelle's word is a by the constitution of the person, the nature of the warrant for the fact, whoever oversleeps himself death, and the state of the atmosphere. With will have to finish out his slumbers in the grave the aged and feeble, with those who die of chronic --which, beyond doubt, is the most powerful diseases, and are wasted away by lingering sickincentive to early rising that was ever devised. ness, it comes on quickly-sometimes in half an But in France, the grand theatre for these har- hour-and remains for a period which is short in rowing tragedies, it is usual to bury on the third proportion to the rapidity of its appearance. With day; and if at that interval it was common for the strong and the muscular, with the greater part seeming corpses to revive, we, in this country, of the persons who perish by a sudden or violent should be habituated to behold persons whose death in the fulness of their powers, it is slow in death had been announced, whose knell had tolled, advancing, and slow in going off. In cases like and whose coffins had been made, rise up and doff these, it is often a day or two before it commences, their grave-clothes, to appear once more among and it has been known to last a week. astonished friends. Yet, so far is this from being decay begins its reign, this interregnum of cona frequent occurrence, that who ever heard in traction is at an end, and therefore a warm and modern England of a person who had been num- humid atmosphere, which hastens corruption, curhered three days among the dead resuming his tails the period of rigidity, while it is protracted vacant place among the living? At sea there in the cold and dry weather that keeps putrefacmay be better ground for apprehension. Nothing tion at bay. Though a symptom of some disormore excites the superstitious fears of a sailor than ders, there is this clear line between mortal rigida cat thrown overboard or a corpse that is not; ity and the spasm of disease—that in the latter and very shortly after death occurs it is usual to the attack is never preceded by the appearance of transfer the body from the ship to the deep. On death. In the one case the result comes after a one occasion a man, with concussion of the brain, train of inanimate phenomena; in the other, amidst who had lost the power of speech and motion, functions peculiar to life. The alarmists, who overheard what must have been to him the most deal in extravagant fables, will persist in retaining interesting conversation that ever fell upon his unreasonable fears; but upon no question are medears-a discussion between his brother and the ical authorities more thoroughly agreed than that captain of the vessel, as to whether he should be the moment the contraction of the muscles is appaimmediately consigned to the waves, or be carried rent, there can be no revival, unless the breath of to Rotterdam, to be buried on shore. Luckily life could be breathed afresh into the untenanted their predilections were for a land funeral; and, clay. though a colloquy so alarming might have been expected to complete the injury to the poor man's brain, he recovered from the double shock of fright and disease. Dr. Alfred Taylor, who has treated the signs of death with the sound sense and science that distinguish all his writings upon legal When There is one effect of the muscular contraction of death which often occasions erroneous and painful ideas. In the stage of relaxation, when the muscles fall, and there is neither physical action nor mental emotion to disturb the calm, the countenance assumes the "mild, angelic air" described |