position they were in at the moment the individuals met their death, 

 are doubtless to be explained on the supposition that, in consequence 

 of previous excessive exertion, rigidity came on at once. In a case of 

 a man who kept his arms extended for a long while to avoid being 

 drowned, the arms after death were found rigid in the position they 

 had before*. I was told by a military surgeon that putrefaction 

 appears very soon in the corpses of soldiers killed after the over-ex- 

 ertion of a prolonged battle. Thus all we know concerning man 

 seems also in harmony with the law I am endeavouring to illustrate. 



5th. Influence of nutrition of muscles on cadaveric rigidity and 

 putrefaction. Nysten f has shown that when death occurs accident- 

 ally in persons in health, in whom the state of nutrition of muscles 

 is very good, and in whom therefore these organs are endowed with a 

 high degree of irritability, cadaveric rigidity sets in long after death 

 and persists very long. It is so, especially, in cases of death by de- 

 capitation, strangulation, asphyxia from non- toxic gases or submer- 

 sion, by sudden haemorrhage from a wound of a large artery, &c. 

 Nysten states that he has seen cadaveric rigidity beginning only six- 

 teen or eighteen hours after death, and lasting six or seven days. Dr. 

 J. A. Symonds, in an excellent article on 'Death J/ states that he has 

 seen cadaveric rigidity eight days after death by hanging. My own 

 observations show that in the bodies of healthy persons decapitated 

 or asphyxiated, cadaveric rigidity does not appear sooner than ten or 

 twelve hours after death, and that it lasts more than a week when the 

 weather is not extremely warm. In the limbs of the two decapitated 

 men on whose bodies I made experiments on the restoration of mus- 

 cular irritability by injections of blood, I found that there was some 

 degree of irritability thirteen or fourteen hours after death, before any 

 blood had been injected. Nysten has seen muscular irritability lasting 

 twenty-six hours in a decapitated man, which is a fact clearly showing 

 that cadaveric rigidity may appear only after twenty-six hours. 



The reverse is seen when nutrition has been diminished for a long 

 while before death. In a man who died at the Hopital du Gros- 

 Caillou at Paris, in the summer of 1849, cadaveric rigidity became 

 evident within three minutes after the last breathing, and while the 



* Taylor's Manual of Med. Jurisprudence, p. 734. 



t Recherches de Physiologie et de Chimie Palhol. 1811, p. 387. 



J Cyclopaedia of Anat. and Physiol. vol. i. p. 805. 



