RESPIRATION. 225 



ous state of insensibility, the absence of air, like the absence of 

 food or the administration of strong agents, may be borne for a 

 very long time. Even fainting renders submersion less dan- 

 gerous. 



Venous blood is not calculated for life. When it was injected 

 into the carotids, Bichat found that the brain became af- 

 fected, as if poisoned, and death gradually ensued ; and, when 

 it circulated through the coronary arteries of the heart, the 

 action of which organ will continue though its left cavities 

 are supplied with venous blood, the heart's motion ceased, and 

 the functions of each organ were impeded, and at length ceased, 

 when venous blood circulated through its arteries. 8 When death 

 occurs by impediment to the functions of the lungs, the heart 

 loses its irritability by its substance becoming penetrated with 

 venous blood, and ceases to propel the blood of its cavities ; and 

 the brain, becoming powerless from the same cause, ceases both 

 to perceive uneasiness in the lungs from the want of fresh air, and 

 to be able to will inspiration. If the death of the body arise 



quently saw divers remain, in the Bay of Naples, under water for three minutes. 

 In Percival's History of Ceylon, they are said sometimes to remain five minutes 

 under water. 



Some very grand instances of exaggeration on this subject will be found 

 in an amusing and useful book, entitled The Uncertainty of the Signs of Death. 

 M. D'Egly, Member of the Royal Society of Inscriptions, declares that he was 

 engaged to a dinner for which the fish was to be provided by a Swiss diver, who 

 got his living by plunging into the water and pulling the fish out of their holes. 

 The dinner hour arrived, but no fish. Drags were employed, and the diver's body 

 found. The curate wished to bury it immediately, as it had been nine hours under 

 water, but M. D'Egly determined on attempting resuscitation, and succeeded in 

 three quarters of an hour. The Rev. Mr. Derham, in his Physico-Theology, is 

 more credulous than the Cure ; he quotes Pechlin for the case of a man pensioned 

 by the queen for having joined his fellow-creatures again, after remaining up- 

 right under water, his feet sticking in the muddy bottom, for sixteen hours, at 

 Tronningholm. Yet this is nothing ; for Mr. Tilesius, the keeper of the royal 

 library, has written an account of a woman whom he saw alive and well, after 

 being three days under water. And this is nothing; for Mr. Burmann declares he 

 heard a funeral sermon at Boness in Lithovia, upon an old man of seventy, who, 

 the preacher protested, had fallen into the water when sixteen years old, and re- 

 mained under it for seven weeks. Mr. Brydone was told that one diver, called 

 Calas, but nicknamed Pesce, could live several days in the sea ; and Kircher 

 asserts, that this aquatic person could walk under water from Sicily to Italy. 



* Bichat, Recherches Physiologiques, p. ii. art. 6, 7, 8. 



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