238 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



when it comes quickly and without previous announcement; so the 

 confessions of some persons who have escaped the gravest dangers 

 would make us believe. Mr. Wallace has recorded some incidents 

 of this kind in his Darwinism, and says of them that those persons 

 who have escaped from the clutches of a lion or a tiger experienced 

 no physical or moral suffering in their peril. Dr. Livingstone 

 describes his feeling when seized and shaken by a lion as a kind of 

 stupor with no pain or terror, although he was fully conscious of 

 what had happened to him; so a chloroformed subject is able to 

 follow the operation without feeling the instrument. Mr. Whyrn- 

 per, when he fell several hundred feet on the Matterhorn, rolling 

 from rock to rock till he alighted on a mass of snow which fortu- 

 nately held him just clear of the edge of a precipice, although he 

 received a number of contusions, felt no pain and did not lose con- 

 sciousness, but simply speculated as to the number of tumbles he 

 would still receive before it would be over with. 



The questions arise whether the nervous shock occasioned by the 

 accident produces a kind of insensibility which paralyzes, as it were, 

 the feelings of fear and terror, or whether the affair goes on so 

 rapidly that there is no time for the formation of all the complex 

 of images and feelings that culminate in the fear of death. Liv- 

 ingstone's precise observation suggests that there is really a kind of 

 acquired insensibility. His comparison of his condition to that of a 

 subject under the influence of chloroform appears more than proba- 

 ble when we reflect that severe nervous shocks of every kind coming 

 under the form of extremely violent and sudden sensations or emo- 

 tions produce this sort of hypnotic anaesthesia. It is well known, 

 for example, that if we fall and receive a rude shock we remain for 

 some time unconscious, or at least with a diminished sensibility. 

 The same eifect is produced by a sudden affliction, as, for example, 

 a surprise of very bad news; grief does not follow at once, but a 

 kind of insensible stupor with only the most obtuse consciousness 

 of pain and of self. Thus the nervous shock provoked by the tum- 

 ble over the rocks or by lying helpless under the paw of a wild 

 beast would produce a kind of semi-sensibility, in which the 

 thought of death would present itself just like any other thought 

 without exciting any fear or terror. 



Another extremely interesting problem in psychology lies in 

 the study of the thoughts and feelings of the sick with respect to 

 death. Are they preoccupied in the course of their illness with 

 this probable ending? Do they preserve the habitual carelessness 

 of all mankind? What relation exists between the moral charac- 

 ter of the patient, between the kind of disease, and the fear of 

 death? I can not fully answer these questions for want of a suffi.- 



