184 DR. PHILIP ON THE NATURE OF DEATH. 



The offending cause makes its impression on the organs of the sensitive system, and 

 therefore in all, the sensibility is more or less directly impaired by it ; and although 

 it is only in the first that sleep can be regarded as the immediate cause of what 

 is called death, the cause of injury in the second stage of the second form, and 

 throughout the whole of the third form, producing the sedative effect, and conse- 

 quently more or less tending to prevent sleep, yet tends, although in a different way, 

 to impair the sensibility ; and the termination in all such cases, as I have already had 

 occasion to observe, if no other cause of injury arise in the course of the disease, is a 

 state of nervous apoplexy, in so many cases the prelude of death, which, if not suffi- 

 ciently violent or sudden, so to impair the powers of circulation as thus immediately 

 to destroy those of the sensitive system, proves fatal by equally impairing the sen- 

 sibility and impeding the assimilating processes ; and as sleep relieves us from the 

 ordinary stimulants of the day, the insensibility thus induced, relieves us from the 

 sufferings of the disease, which, although it is not, like sleep, preceded by the grateful 

 feelings of repose, is preceded by a gradual diminution of those sufferings. 



THE forms of death which remain to be considered differ essentially from the fore- 

 going. It will place in a clearer point of view both what I am about to say of these 

 formjs of it, and what has been said of its preceding forms, to consider more minutely 

 than has hitherto been done in this paper, or, as far as I know, in any other discus- 

 sion on the subject, the nature and relation of the functions of the living animal. 



IN the community of functions which constitutes the life of man and all the more 

 perfect animals, the sensitive are the working functions, those by which we perceive 

 and act ; the vital, those by which they are maintained. To the former, therefore, 

 belong the immediate wear and tear of intercourse with the external world, and, con- 

 sequently, the necessity of accommodating themselves to an infinite variety of circum- 

 stances. The vital functions, having but one object, pursue a steady course, from 

 which, in health, they never deviate, except as far as is necessary to accommodate 

 themselves to the necessities of the more eccentric functions of the sensitive system, 

 the well-being of the organs of which depends on them ; for they are capable of imme- 

 diately influencing as well as being influenced by the inanimate agents which exist 

 within our bodies; on the action of which the due structure as well as functions of 

 every part depend. On this principle our food is digested ; on the same principle the 

 heart beats, and the secreting and other assimilating organs effect all their chemical 

 changes. Thus the sensitive parts of the brain and spinal marrow are maintained, and 

 thus also are maintained two sets of organs ; through one of which, namely, the organs of 

 the external senses with the nerves which convey the impressions made on them, these 

 parts are capable of being influenced by the inanimate agents external to our bodies ; 

 and through the other of which, namely, the nerves and muscles of voluntary motion, 

 they are capable of influencing those agents. These two sets of organs, allied by their 



