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SECTION V. 



DEATH OF THE ORGANIC LIFE. 

 CHAP. I.- Death in Connexion with Disease. 



1. BY the term " death" is implied a cessation of the 

 phenomena which characterize the state of life. It has been said 

 that life is distinguished by its preserving the cohesion of the 

 structures. This is to some extent true; yet we cannot estimate 

 the continuance of life by the preservation of the structures, for 

 their integrity remains many days after death. We must then 

 enumerate some other of the phenomena of life, by the cessation 

 of which the state of death might be distinguished. Without 

 waiting for the dissolution of the textures, we may say that death 

 has happened when respiration has ceased, and when the action of 

 the heart has ceased; when the blood, no longer in motion, has 

 coagulated in the heart and in its vessels; and when the tempera- 

 ture of the body is reduced to that of the medium by which it is 

 surrounded. It will scarcely be imagined that a man is not dead 

 when these things have taken place. Life is a state of properties 

 which produces phenomena before enumerated, and readily agreed 

 upon: death is a state of properties incapable of producing any 

 of those phenomena characteristic of life. 



2. In a case, as of sudden, death, all the properties which 

 accomplished the phenomena of life still inhere with the subject, 

 or are involved in his structures: the change is one of combina- 

 tion, by which an elementary or separated state, has succeeded to 

 the formal state, of the properties which identified life. In what 

 the change consists we cannot specify; nor can we say with what 

 substances or properties those of life are related at the period of 

 this change, because our senses are not qualified to take cogni- 



