1054 OF DEATH. 



and mode of life, and having been chiefly influenced as to degree by the length 

 of time during which the transforming causes have been in operation. At any 

 rate, it may be safely affirmed that there is no physical peculiarity which entitles 

 the Oceanic races to rank as a group which must have necessarily had an origi- 

 nal stock distinct from that of the continental nations. 



CHAPTER XXI. 



OF DEATH. 



1064. IT seems inherent in the very nature of Vital Action, that it can only 

 be sustained during a limited period by any Organized body ; for although the 

 duration of certain structures may be prolonged, and their vital properties 

 retained, almost indefinitely, yet this is only when the withdrawal of all extrane- 

 ous agencies has reduced them to a condition of complete inactivity ( 114). 

 The Organized fabric, in fact, is at the same time the instrument whereby Vital 

 Force is exercised, and the subject of its operation ; and of this operation, as 

 we have seen ( 114), decline is no less a constituent part than development, 

 and Death is its necessary sequence. Hence, in the performance of each one 

 of those Functions whose aggregate makes up the Life of Man, the particu- 

 lar organ which ministers to that function undergoes a certain loss by the 

 decline and death of its component tissues ; and this the more rapidly, in pro- 

 portion to the activity of the changes which are effected by their instrumentality. 

 But if the regenerative processes be also performed with due vigor, no deteri- 

 oration of the organ is manifested, since every loss of substance is compensated 

 by the production of an equivalent amount of new and similar tissue. This 

 regenerative power, however, gradually diminishes with the advance of years ; 

 and thus it happens that the entire organism progressively deteriorates ( 133), 

 and that Death at last supervenes from a general failure of the vital powers, rather 

 than from the perversion or cessation of any one class of actions in particular. 



1065. But Death may occur at any period of Life, from some local interrup- 

 tion produced by disease or injury in the regular sequence of vital actions ; such 

 interruption extending itself from the part in which it commences to the organism 

 in general, in virtue of that intimate mutual dependence of one function upon 

 another which is characteristic of all the higher orders of living beings. The 

 death of the body, as a whole, which may be appropriately designated Somatic 1 

 death, becomes a necessary consequence of the death of a certain part of it, or 

 Molecular death, only when the cessation of activity in the latter interferes with 

 the elaboration, the circulation, or the depuration of the Blood, which supplies not 

 merely the nutritive pabulum to every part of the organism, but also the oxygen 

 which is essential to the activity of the nervo-muscular apparatus. Thus, even in 

 the higher animals, the death or removal of the limbs, although they may consti- 

 tute (as in Man) a large proportion of the fabric, is not necessarily fatal ; because 

 it involves no interruption, either in the nutritive operations of the viscera, or 

 in the sensorial functions of the brain. 2 On the other hand, the destruction of 



1 This terra was first suggested by Dr. Prichard in place of the less accurate term " sys- 

 temic," which was previously in use. (See "Cyclop, of Anat. andPhysiol.,"vol. x. p. 791.) 



2 The Author has been informed by Dr. Daniell that it is not at all uncommon, in Ne- 

 groes who are in the last stage of the adynamic fevers of the African coast, for death and 

 decomposition to extend gradually upwards from the extremities to the trunk ; so that the 



