6i8 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



form of dissolution revealed to. us even now in perfect, though excep- 

 tional, illustration. We have all seen Nature, in rare instances, vin- 

 dicatino- herself despite the social opposition to her, and showing how 

 tenderly, how soothingly, how like a mother with her foot on the 

 cradle, she would, if she were permitted, rock us all gently out of the 

 world ; how, if tlie free-will with which she has armed us were brought 

 into accord with her designs, she would give us the riches, the beau- 

 ties, the wonders of the universe for our portion so long as we could 

 receive and enjoy them; and at last would gently withdraw us from 

 them, sense by sense, with such imperception that the pain of the 

 withdrawal would be unfelt and indeed unknown. 



Ten times in my own observation I remember witnessing, with at- 

 tentive mind, these phenomena of natural euthanasia. Without pain, 

 anger, or sorrow, the intellectual faculties of the fated man lose their 

 brightness. Ambition ceases or sinks into desire for repose. Ideas 

 of time, of space, of duty, lingeringly pass away. To sleep and not 

 to dream is the pressing, and, step by step, still pressing need ; until 

 at length it whiles away nearly all the hours. The awakenings are 

 short and shorter ; painless, careless, happy awakenings to the hum of 

 a busy world, to the merry sounds of children at play, to the sounds 

 of voices offering aid ; to the effort of talking on simple topics and 

 recalling events that have dwelt longest on the memory; and then 

 again the overpowering sleep. Thus on and on, until, at length, the 

 intellectual nature is lost, the instinctive and merely animal functions, 

 now no longer required to sustain the higher faculties, in their turn 

 succumb and. fall into the inertia. 



This is death by Nature, and when mankind has learned the truth, 

 when the time shall come as come it will that " there shall be no 

 more an infant of days, nor an old man who hath not filled his days," 

 this act of death, now, as a rule, so dreaded because so premature, 

 shall, arriving only at its appointed hour, suggest no terror, inflict no 

 agony. 



The sharpness of death removed from those who die, the poignancy 

 of grief would be almost equally removed from those who survive, 

 were natural euthanasia the prevailing fact. Our sensibilities are 

 governed by the observance of natural law and the breach of it. It 

 is only when Nature is vehemently interrupted that we either wonder 

 or weep. Thus the old Greeks, fathers of true mirth, who looked on 

 prolonged, grief as an offense, and attached the word madness to mel- 

 ancholy, even they were so far imbued with sorrow when the child or 

 youth died, that they bore the lifeless body to the pyre in the break 

 of the morning, lest the sun should behold so sad a sight as the young 

 dead ; while we, who court rather than seek to dismiss melancholy, 

 who find poetry and piety in melancholic reverie, and who indulge 

 too often in what, after a time, becomes the luxury of woe, experience 

 a gradation of suffering as we witness the work of death. For the 



