THE PHYSIOLOGY OF DEATH. 3Q9 



and pulsations. The hand, placed in its neighborhood, feels 

 no throb. Such is the physiognomy of a person in the last 

 moments of death in the greater number of cases, that is, 

 when death follows upon a period of illness of some dura- 

 tion. The death-struggle is seldom painful, and almost 

 always the patient feels nothing of it. He is plunged into 

 a comatose stupor, so that he is no longer conscious of his 

 situation or his sufferings, and he passes insensibly from 

 life to death, in a manner that renders it sometimes difficult 

 to fix the exact instant at which a dying person expires. 

 This is true, at least, in chronic maladies, and especially 

 in those that consume the human body slowly and silently. 

 Yet, when the hour of death comes for ardent organiza- 

 tions for great artists, for instance, and they usually die 

 young there is a quick and sublime new burst of life in 

 the creative genius. There is no better example of this 

 than the angelic end of Beethoven, who, before he breathed 

 out his soul, that tuneful monad,' regained his lost speech 

 and hearing, and spent them in repeating for the last time 

 some of those sweet harmonies which he called his " Prayers 

 to God." Some diseases, moreover, are most peculiarly 

 marked by the gentleness of the dying agony. Of all the 

 ills that cheat us while killing by pin-pricks, consumption 

 is that which longest wears for us the illusive look of health, 

 and best conceals the misery of living and the horror of 

 dying. Nothing can be compared with that hallucination 

 of the senses and that liveliness of hope which mark the 

 last days of the consumptive. He takes the burning of his 

 destroying fever for a healthful symptom, he forms his 

 plans, and smiles calmly and cheerfully on his friends, and 

 suddenly, some morrow of a quiet night, he falls into the 

 sleep that never wakes. 



If life is everywhere, and if, consequently, death occurs 

 everywhere, in all the elements of the system, what must be 

 thought of that point in the spinal marrow which a famous 



