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who are not acquainted with this curious fact. Happening accident- 

 ally to place my ear against the arm of a patient who had died of 

 cholera, to my astonishment I heard the well known musical hum, I 

 sprang to my feet, and at once placed my ear to the man's heart, think- 

 ing that he was alive, and that I might be able to save him ; but he was 

 dead. The heart had ceased to beat, but the muscles still continued 

 to live. The heart has been called by ancient physiologists the first to 

 live and the last to die—prifmcm vivens, ultimum moriens ; but that is 

 not true in cases of cholera. After the heart has ceased to live, after 

 the brain has ceased to act, when the man is dead, his muscles live ; 

 their temperature rises, and the last traces of life remain in the body like 

 the lingering music of the chords of a harp which the master's hand has 

 ceased to play. I resolved to try and ascertain the precise note of this 

 musical hum. I constructed a number of organ-pipes, and succeeded, by 

 processes that would be too long to describe to you here, in imprison- 

 ing the musical hum in one of these pipes, where I could afterwards 

 measure it at my leisure and determine its character. I had an organ- 

 pipe made accurately to vibrate the note two octaves below C in the 

 bass, which corresponds with thirty-two double vibrations in a second. 

 The note two octaves below d in the bass corresponds with thirty-six 

 double vibrations in the second. Now a very little trial showed me 

 that the musical note of a muscle lay between these two notes. By 

 fixing a second organ-pipe as exactly as I could to the musical hum of 

 my own muscles, and then comparing the notes of the two organ-pipes 

 by their beats, I was enabled to ascertain with, I believe, a consider- 

 able degree of precision, the exact note of the musical tone produced 

 by the contraction of the muscles. This I made to be thirty- five and 

 one-third vibrations per second. Shortly after I published this result, 

 Dr. Collongues, who had moved from Marseilles to Paris, sent me a 

 book which he had published a short time before my own, in which he 

 had succeeded in proving, by measurements made with tuning-forks, 

 that the vibration corresponding to the hum of the muscular contrac- 

 tion is thirty-six. This very remarkable result, obtained by two totally 

 different methods of experimenting — by myself in Dublin with organ- 

 pipes, and by Dr. Collongues in Marseilles with tuning-forks — imme- 

 diately attracted attention. Dr. Collongues naturally was very uneasy 

 about the question of priority ; and I took the opportunity of calling 

 upon him in Paris to explain to him that I admitted his priority, and 

 that I was more pleased to find that we had succeeded independently of 

 each other in obtaining the same note, than if I had myself established 

 a claim to have made the first discovery. At the close of our interview, 

 which was very friendly, he embraced me. He had a long black 

 beard, and I have a distinct recollection that it smelt very strongly of 

 tobacco. 



