640 TRANSLATIONS FROM CONTINENTAL JOURNALS. 
blood had preserved its normal characters; it contained 130 
milligrammes of sugar per cent.; about the usual proportion. 
The substance of the liver contained not less than 2 
grammes 800 milligrammes per cent. Everything, there¬ 
fore liad pursued the same course as in the horse. It was 
the same with birds. A goose weighing 4800 grammes was 
deprived of food, but was allowed water ad libitum ; it lived 
forty-four days, at the end of which it had lost 2475 grammes, 
or tlie half of its original weight; the diurnal loss was 56 
grammes 27, 11 grammes, 72 per kilogramme of living 
weight. In the first thirty-five days the temperature was 
maintained at 41 centigrades, the day before the last it was 
40. After death I arrived at the following statistics :—skin, 
muscles and blood, weighed 986 grammes; viscera, 254; 
bones, 419; feathers and horny substance, 179; fatty matters, 
446; loss, 41; total, 2325. Thus the fatty matter after 
death still amounted to one fifth of the weight of the body ; 
the muscular system was not so much atrophied; finally, the 
liver contained sugar to the amount of 2 grammes 4 centi¬ 
grammes per cent. 
It must not be supposed that what has been the result 
with this horse, the cat, and goose, would in every other case 
he the same; verv far from it. AYe have hitherto had to deal 
with fat animals; with lean ones the result would be verv 
different. I deprived a lean but vigorous horse of food ; at 
the end of a few days the countenance changed, the flanks 
became hollow, the coat was staring, the strength was lost; 
he could hardly stand, his walk was staggering; he lay down 
on his sternum, and soon turned over on his side; the skin 
and the extremites became cold, cold sweats supervened, and 
were followed by the convulsions of death. Life cannot be 
maintained for any length of time when the elements for the 
reconstitution of the blood and for combustion to maintain 
the calorification are wanting. At the autopsy we find a poor 
blood, without sugar, with a clear serum deprived of fat, a 
black liver, the cells of which contain neither sugar nor 
fatty matter. The muscles are stringy and flabby, and 
instead of fat there is onlv a tissue infiltrated with a vel- 
^ * 
lowish serosity. Even the marrow in the bones has been 
replaced by a viscous serosity, of a citrine colour. If I 
submit lean dogs or cats to deprivation of food, instead 
of living, like the others, for five or six weeks, they speedily 
become cold, and die in from ten to twelve clays, and even in 
less time. It is still worse if I take a lean fowl or a turke}"; 
after three or four davs of inanition thev succumb. This is, 
if I am not mistaken, the great law of abstinence—the du- 
