Vital and Physical Motion. 1 1 1 



wished again and again for death to come and put an 

 end to them: I was amazed to find that the spasm 

 seemed to keep firm hold in spite of death : I had to wait 

 until the evening of the fourth day after death, when 

 putrefaction had evidently set in, before any unmistake- 

 able signs of muscular relaxation were to be detected. 

 The animal, when the spasms were at their height, 

 stood tip-toe on its up-stretched hind legs, leaning 

 against a hamper which happened to be within reach, 

 pawing the air, and with the body arched backward 

 until the ears lay over the scut a rampant position 

 from which it must have fallen down at once if the 

 muscular contraction had yielded for a moment to relax- 

 ation ; and yet it did not so fall until the muscles were 

 softened by putrefaction. This is what I witnessed. 

 It seemed as if the spasmodic rigidity which existed 

 before death had passed without any interval of relax- 

 ation into the cadaveric rigidity which always comes on, 

 sooner or later, after death, and which is only relaxed by 

 the actual decomposition of the muscular tissue. It 

 seemed as if the spasm had passed at once into rigor 

 mortis. At first all my prejudices were against such a 

 notion ; in the end, I came to believe, most unhesitatingly, 

 that a radical change was necessary in the doctrine of 

 vital motion, that the interpretation of spasm was to 

 be sought, not on the side of life, but on that of death, 

 that spasm and rigor mortis were to be regarded, not 

 as signs of vital action in certain vital properties of con- 

 tractility, but as physical phenomena akin to, if not 

 identical with, the return of an elastic body from a pre- 

 vious state of extension, that muscular contraction in 

 all its forms might be the simple consequence of the 

 operation of the natural attractive force or forces in- 

 herent in the physical constitution of the muscular mole- 



