172 DR. PHILIP ON THE NATURE OF DEATH. 



As it is by the continued action of the vital parts in sleep that the sensitive parts 

 are restored, the less active the former become, they necessarily effect their restoration 

 the less readily ; and when they can no longer effect it, the individual awakes no 

 more ; but the circumstance of the vital being no longer capable of restoring the sen- 

 sitive system, makes no alteration in the nature of its exhaustion. It is still, while it 

 lasts, the same exhaustion which constitutes sleep. The sleep proves final ; but the 

 sleeper is wholly unconscious of the cause which renders it so ; and there is nothing 

 in its commencement to inform us whether it will be final or not. Thus the sensibility 

 is extinguished, and consequently respiration ceases. The extinction of the sensibility 

 is the last act of dying, in the common acceptation of the term. As the ordinary sti- 

 mulants of the day produce the sleep of daily occurrence, those of life produce the 

 sleep of death. 



Although the sleep of each day restores the sensitive system from the exhaustion 

 which causes it, the daily recurrence of the exhaustion has the effect of permanently 

 lessening the excitability of that system ; a change not to be perceived from day to 

 day, but which, from many phenomena, becomes sensible in the course of years. As 

 the sensitive system becomes less excitable as the day advances than on first awaking, 

 so it becomes less excitable as life advances than in childhood ; and in like manner, as 

 the repeated excitement of the sensitive system tends to the final decay of its sen- 

 sibility, the continued excitement of the vital system, as we might a priori have sup- 

 posed, has a similar tendency with respect to the excitability of this system. We 

 find the pulse becoming slower as we advance in life, in consequence of the lessened 

 excitability of the heart and blood-vessels, and the vital organs less readily influenced 

 by the parts of the nervous system associated with them, proving that their functions 

 also are under the process of decay. On the functions of these parts and the powers 

 of circulation, all the assimilating processes depend ; and the shrinking frames of the 

 aged indicate their weakened state and the approach of their final extinction ; for 

 those were deceived who taught that there is nothing in the laws of our frame which 

 should lead us to believe that it is not formed to last for ever. 



The greatest degree of excitability, either in the sensitive or vital system, is not that 

 which produces the most vigorous state of health. We may be too excitable as well 

 as too little so. Many of the more serious diseases of children arise from this cause. 

 The derangement of the digestive organs, which in the adult produces the nervous 

 irritations of indigestion, produces in the infant inflammation of, and effusion on, th^ 

 brain. The irritation of the gums, which produces pain and restlessness in the former, 

 in the latter produces convulsions and death. Thus it is that the habit of the child is 

 less firm and vigorous than that of the adult, which has acquired steadiness by the 

 diminution of its excitability, in consequence of the continued action of the stimulants 

 of life ; but, after a certain period, the fault is a deficiency, not a redundance, of ex- 

 citability, a defect apparently the necessary consecjuence of the laws of our frame, 

 and to which every day unavoidably adds. 



