280 
POPULAR SCIENCE REVIEW. 
EXCEPTIONS TO THE NATUEAL DEATH. 
In the natural order and course of the universe there are 
admitted, as I have said already, some exceptions from the 
process of the purely natural death. Unswerving in great 
designs, and at the same time foreseeing every detail of result, 
the supreme organising mind has imposed on the living world 
his storms and tempests and earthquakes and lightnings, and all 
those great voices and sublime manifestations of his mighty 
power, which, in the infant days of the world, men saw or heard 
with servile fear. Thus has he exposed us to natural accidents, 
but so wisely that to those of the creation who are most exposed 
he gives a preponderance of number, so that during the form- 
ing from the first to the last stage, they shall not suffer ultimate 
loss by disproportion of mortality. Perchance, too, if we could 
discover the law, he has provided for such excess of life as shall 
meet every accident natural and human. Be this as it may, he 
has provided in respect to death by purely natural causes — causes 
I mean, coming direct from nature without the intervention of 
man ; that, in the vast majority of such cases, the death, sudden, 
unexpected, inevitable, shall be painless also. As a rule, all 
forms of death by violence of nature are deaths from the in- 
fluences of forces all-powerful. Lightning-stroke, sun-stroke, 
crash of matter, swift burial in great waters — these are the 
common acts of nature that kill. To the mind these acts 
present such grandeur of effect, they strike it with a sublime 
awe ; but the body subjected to their fatal stroke is so killed, it 
hath not time to know or to feel. When we experience any 
sensation of pleasure or of pain, we have in truth to pass 
through three acts, each distinct and in succession. We have 
to receive the impression, and it has to be transmitted to the 
organ of the mind ; here it has to be fixed or registered ; lastly, 
tlie mind has to become aware that the impression is registered, 
wliich last act is in truth the conscious act. But for all these 
acts the element of time is required, and although the time 
seems to be almost inappreciable, it may be sufficient. Thus 
with respect to lightning-stroke, if it strike the body to kill, it 
accomplishes its destruction so swiftly, the impression conveyed 
to the body is not registered, and therefore is not known or 
felt ; the veritable death, the unconsciousness of existence, is 
the first and the last fact of the impression inflicted on the 
stricken organism. For illustration of this truth I have recently 
seen — in experiments on the discharge of the Leyden battery at 
the Polytechnic (the jars being placed in what is called cascade) 
— animals struck so suddenly to death that they retained, in 
