stealthy but steady strides, so that, literally, "dying, we +die!"

II. ESSENTIAL NATURE OF DEATH.

We have noticed the sentence of death and the univer

+ sality of its execution. We have seen man every-where surrounded by the dark and gloomy symbols; we have seen him with the dread sentence, "Thou shalt surely die!" pealing evermore in his ear, and breaking, with its solemn cadences, upon his soul. What, then, is the essential nature of this physical death?

It is something more than pain and suffering. We almost daily meet with cases of excruciating bodily distress, when every nerve seems wrought up with intensest agony, but death is not the result. The individual recovers. But, on the other hand, the "silver cord is loosened," sometimes so gently that it is impossible to mark the moment of departure. Indeed, suffering belongs to life; to death, quietude.

It is something more than the exhaustion and emaciation of sickness; for the victim of disease that has pined into the most shadowy form-in which nearly all that is material is wasted and gone-has yet come back to life, and glowed with all the ruddiness of youth and health. Another, in the maturity of his manhood, with the flush of health upon his cheek, the marrow of fatness in his bones, sinks down suddenly without external sign or internal premonition, and is gone.

The arms and the legs have been severed from the body, and the trunk has even suffered mutilation, till almost the very form of humanity was lost; yet life still remainedintellect, affection, and hope survived. So, also, the sight, the hearing, the taste, the smell, and even the sense of feeling, in a large portion of the body, has been lost, and yet neither of these privations constituted death. The

whole limbs and body have been paralyzed, even up to the neck, by injury to the spine, and yet something beyond all that must occur before it could be said that the individual was dead. We have already seen that even the brain, the mind's own peculiar organ, may be extensively diseased, and yet life remain. Even respiration, and with it all bodily motion, have, apparently, ceased for days. Few, if any, signs of life remained; yet it was trance, and not death. Death is something beyond all these.

What, then, is death? The answer is so pertinently given by a modern writer that we quote him in extenso. He says: "Death is the absolute cessation of all that which makes matter the instrument and dwelling not only of the spirit which is in man, but of the life or animating power which is in brutes, and of the vital operation which is in vegetables, and even of the cohesion which united the particles of the body. A dead body has ceased to have any existence of its own; the merest stone has more; every moment carries off some of its atoms, till all have joined the surrounding elements, so far as the process can be traced by the human eye or by science. The particles of stone adhere to one another till they are forcibly driven asunder or are separated by chemical action; the particles of the human body, after death, fall asunder of themselves, or through the chemistry of nature.

"But the stone has no life, and there is life in the flower or shrub-life from that great vital stream which pervades the universe, but a life simply passive-a similar life to that which carries on the involuntary operations of the human frame, and in death this life, too, is removed. Digestion, absorption, secretion, circulation are, as it were, the vegetable parts of man; the power which gives them action returns at death into the general current of natural operations, from which it has been set apart in his person. The

brute has a still higher life. He is conscious of the vital stream; he feels, acts, resists, consents, dimly remembers, almost reasons. His is the same life which in man performs these various operations; so that, in certain states, when they are performed in the least measure, as in infancy, in idiocy, or when the brain has been grievously injured, little more is seen in man than in the inferior animals. In death the senses go out, even the corporeal machinery comes to an utter pause; and this animal life, too, passes from our sight and from its habitation.

"That highest life of all; that which belongs to man alone, among all visible creatures; that life of the spirit which makes him capable of speech, and thus of distinct thought; which makes him a moral being, and therefore responsible to his Maker; that life returns not to the dust, nor to the current of vital power which animates plants or brutes, for it came not from those sources. But it disappears like the rest; this moment it is here, perhaps as clear, as vigorous as ever; the next we gaze upon that which has neither power, nor sensibility, nor expression, and which is as far below the meanest living things as it was lately exalted above them.

"The dissolution of the body, the withdrawal of the vital principle, the departure of the immortal spiritthis is DEATH."

III. PROCESS AND SYMPTOMS OF DYING.

It is generally admitted by physiologists that different portions of the body die in succession. And this accords with the common observation of the dying process. Prof. Draper says that the system of animal life dies before that of organic. Of the former, the sensory functions fail first,

*Human Physiology.

voluntary motion next, and that the power of muscular contraction under external stimulus still feebly continues. "The blood, in gradual death, first ceases to reach the extremities, its pulsations becoming less and less energetic, so that, failing to gain the periphery, it passes but a little way from the heart; the feet and the hands become cold as the circulating fluid leaves them, the decline of temperature gradually invading the interior." Some of the organic functions often continue for a time, particularly the secretion and the development of heat.

Hippocrates's description of the appearance and acts of the dying man has rarely been equaled, and never been surpassed, by any descriptions of modern physiologists. It is remarkable for its antiquity, for its descriptive particularity, and also as showing that the heritage of dying man has been the same in all ages. For these reasons we give it entire: "If the patient lies on his back, his arms stretched out, and his legs hanging down, it is a sign of great weakness; when he slides down into the bed it denotes death; if, in a burning fever, he is continually feeling about with his hands. and his fingers, and moves them up before his face and eyes, as if he was going to take away something before them, or on his bed-covering, as if he were picking or searching for little straws, or taking away some speck, or drawing out little flocks of wool, all this is a sign that he is delirious, and that he will die. When his lips hang relaxed and cold; when he can not bear the light; when he sheds tears involuntarily; when in dozing some part of the white of the eye is seen, unless he usually sleeps in that manner, these signs prognosticate danger. When his eyes are sparkling, fierce, and fixed, he is delirious, or soon will be so; when they are deadened, as it were, with a mist spread over them, or their brightness lost, it presages death. or great weakness. When the patient has his nose sharp,

his eyes sunk, his temples hollow, his ears cold and contracted, the skin of his forehead tense and dry, and the color of his face tending to a pale-green or leaden tint, one may give out for certain that death is very near, unless the strength of the patient has been exhausted all at once by long watchings, or by a looseness, or being a long time without eating."

A writer in the London Quarterly gives one or two striking thoughts not expressed above. He says: "Startling likenesses to relations and the self of former days are sometimes revealed when the wasting of the flesh has given prominence to the frame-work of the face. The cold of death seizes upon the extremities, and continues to spread— a sign of common notoriety from time immemorial, which Chaucer has described in verse, and Shakspeare in still more picturesque prose. The very breath strikes chill; the skin is clammy; the voice falters and loses its own familiar tones grows sharp and thin, or faint and murmuring, or comes with an unearthly, muffled sound. The pulse, sometimes previously deceitful, breaks down—is first feeble, then slower; the beats are fitful and broken by pauses; the intervals increase in frequency and duration, and at length it falls to rise no more. The respiration, whether languid or labored, becomes slow at the close; the death-rattle is heard at every expulsion of air; the lungs, like the pulse, become intermittent in their action; a minute or two may elapse between the effort to breathe, and then one expiration, which has made to expire' synonymous with 'to die,' and the conflict with the body is over."

IV. THE TERRIBLENESS OF DEATH.

Death derives it terribleness not exclusively from causes moral. God has implanted an instinctive love of life in