THE PHYSIOLOGY OF DEATH. 309 
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 
