2 7 o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



THE PHYSIOLOGY OF DEATH. 



By FEKNAND PAPILLON. 



TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH, BY A. R. MACDONOUGH. 



OF old, the spoils of death fell to the anatomist's share, while the 

 physiologist took for his part the phenomena of life. Now we 

 submit the corpse to the same experiments as the living organism, and 

 pry into the relics of death for the secrets of life. Instead of seeing in 

 the lifeless body mere forms ready to dissolve and vanish, we detect 

 in it forces and persisting activities full of deep instructiveness in their 

 mode of working. As theologians and moralists exhort us to study 

 the spectre of death face to face at times, and strengthen our souls by 

 courageous meditation on our last hour, so medicine regards it as es- 

 sential to direct our attention toward all the details of that mournful 

 drama, and thus to lead us, through gloom and shadows, to a clearer 

 knowledge of life. But it is only with respect to medicine in the most 

 modern days that this is true. 



Leibnitz, who held profound and admirable theories of life, had one 

 of death also, which he has unfolded in a famous letter to Arnauld. 

 He believes that generation is only the development and evolution of 

 an animal already existing in form, and that corruption or death is 

 only the reenvelopment or involution of the same animal, which does 

 not cease to subsist and continue living. The sum of vital energies, 

 consubstantial with monads, does not vary in the world ; generation 

 and death are but changes in the order and adjustment of the princi- 

 ples of vitality, simple transformations from small to great, and vice 

 versa. In other words, Leibnitz sees everywhere eternal and incor- 

 ruptible germs of life, which neither perish at all nor begin. What 

 does begin and perish is the organic machine of which these germs 

 compose the original activity : the elementary gearing of the machine 

 is broken apart, but not destroyed. This is the earlier view held by 

 Leibnitz. He has another, conceiving of generation as a progress of 

 life through degrees ; he can conceive of death also as a gradual re- 

 gress of the same principle, that is to say, that in death life withdraws 

 little by little, just as it came forward little by little in generation. 

 Death is no sudden phenomenon, nor instantaneous evanishing it is 

 a slow operation, a " retrogradation," as the Hanoverian philosopher 

 phrases it. When death shows to us, it has been a long time wearing 

 away the organism, though we have not perceived it, because " disso- 

 lution at first attacks parts invisibly small." Yes, death, before it be- 

 trays itself to the eye by livid pallor, to the touch by marble coldness, 

 before chaining the movements and stiffening the blood of the dying 

 person, creeps with insidious secrecy into the smallest and most hidden 



