ANIMAL MECHANICS. 



7 



by a given amount of muscular action, I cannot treat further 

 at present, as I propose to confine the scope of this work al- 

 together to the mechanical effects of muscles. Of all the 

 methods of estimation hitherto proposed, the chemical (as 

 I have already stated) seems to me to be the most natural, and, 

 in the existing state of science, the most certain. 



That a fresh supply of arterial blood is necessary to enable 

 the muscle to relax its contraction, is proved by many obser- 

 vations and experiments. Among these may be mentioned 

 puerperal convulsions consequent on uterine haemorrhage, the 

 anaemic convulsions witnessed before death in horses and 

 other animals destroyed by venesection, the phenomena of 

 rigor mortis, which disappear when arterial blood is artificially 

 pumped through the dying arteries, and the convulsions caused 

 by simple hanging. 



The curious reader will perhaps excuse the following di- 

 gression on the art of hanging.* 



* I am indebted to my friend Dr. J. K. Ingram, Fellow of Trinity College, 

 Dublin, for the following interesting sketch of the History of the Art of Hanging in 

 England : — 



" Hanging was a mode of execution in use among the Anglo-Saxons. Indeed, 

 in ' Beowulf — which its able Editor, Kemble, believed to be a modernized form of a 

 poem which the invaders of Britain had brought with them from their Continental 

 homes — the gallows (galga) figures as an old-established institution of the Teutonic 

 races of Northern Europe. But it is very difficult to get any definite information as 

 to the history of hanging in England. It seems, however, quite certain that the idea 

 of immediately extinguishing the life of the culprit by a sufficient fall never presented 

 itself to our ancestors ; their only notion was that of suspending him by the neck for 

 what might seem an adequate time to insure (?) strangulation. It is noticed by 

 Blackstone as a somewhat singular fact, that the only warrant the sheriff" has for a 

 capital execution is the signature of the judge to the calendar, or list of all the prison- 

 ers' names, with their respective judgments in the margin ; 1 as, for a capital felony 

 it is written opposite to the prisoner's name, " hanged by the neck ;" formerly, in the 

 days of Latin and abbreviation, " svs. per coll." for " suspendatur per collum.'" 

 Originally, however, he states there was a formal precept to the sheriff* under the 

 hand of the judge; but in none of the law books have I found a copy or exact descrip- 



