274 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



at least, in chronic maladies, and especially in those that consume the 

 human body slowly and silently. Yet, when the hour of death comes 

 for ardent organizations for great artists, for instance, and they usu- 

 ally die young there is a quick and sublime new burst of life in the 

 creative genius. There is no better example of this than the angelic 

 end of Beethoven, who, before he breathed out his soul, that tuneful 

 monad, regained his lost speech and hearing, and spent them in re- 

 peating for the last time some of those sweet harmonies which he 

 called his " Prayers to God." Some diseases, moreover, are most 

 peculiarly marked by the gentleness of the dying agony. Of all the 

 ills that cheat us while killing by pin-pricks, consumption is that 

 which longest wears for us the illusive look of health, and best con- 

 ceals the misery of living and the horror of dying. Nothing can be 

 compared with that hallucination of the senses and that liveliness of 

 hope which mark the last days of the consumptive. He takes the 

 burning of his destroying fever for a healthful symptom, he forms his 

 plans, and smiles calmly and cheerfully on his friends, and suddenly, 

 some morrow of a quiet night, he falls into the sleep that never 

 wakes. 



If life is everywhere, and if, consequently, death occurs everywhere, 

 in all the elements of the system, what must be thought of that point 

 in the spinal marrow which a famous physiologist styled the vital 

 knot, and in which. he professed to lodge the principle of life itself? 

 The point which Flourens regarded as this vital knot is situated nearly 

 at the middle of the prolonged spinal cord that is, the middle of 

 that portion of the nerve-substance which connects the brain with the 

 spinal marrow. This region, in fact, has a fine and dangerous ex- 

 citability. A prick, or the penetration of a needle into it, is 

 enough to cause the instant death of any animal whatever. It is the 

 very means used in physiological laboratories to destroy life swiftly 

 and surely in dogs. That susceptibility is explained in the most nat- 

 ural way. This spot is the starting-point of the nerves that go to the 

 lungs ; the moment that the slighest injury is produced in it, there fol- 

 lows a check on the movements of respiration, and ensuing death. 

 This vital knot of Flourens enjoys no sort of special prerogative. Life 

 is not more concentrated nor more essential in it than elsewhere ; it 

 simply coincides with the initial point of the nerves animating one of 

 the organs indispensable to vitality, the organ of sanguification ; and 

 in living organisms any alteration of the nerves controlling a function 

 brings a serious risk as to its complete performance. There is, there- 

 fore, no such thing as a vital knot, a central fire of life in animals. 

 They are collections of an infinity of infinitely small living creatures, 

 and each one of these microscopic living points is its own life-centre 

 for itself. Each on its own account grows, produces heat, and displays 

 those characteristic activities which depend upon its structure. Each 

 one, by virtue of a preestablished harmony, meets all the rest in the 



