who thus uses the significant word "perhaps")," may be temporarily arrested in an animal, and then some animals may continue apparently dead for long intervals of time, and may yet return to life under conditions favorable to recovery." Dr. Richardson gives a singular illustration of this, describing an experiment which must have appeared even more surprising to those who witnessed it than that in which the rabbit was restored to life. "In one of my lectures on death from cold," he says, "which I delivered in the winter session of 1867, some fish, which during a hard frost had been frozen in a tank at Newcastle-on-Tyne, were sent up to me by rail. They were produced in the completely frozen state at the lecture, and by careful thawing many of them were restored to perfect life. At my Croomian lecture on muscular irritability after systemic death, a similar fact was illustrated from frogs." It would appear, indeed, that, so far as coldblooded animals are concerned, there is no recognizable limit to the time during which they may remain thus frozen yet afterward recover. But, even in their case, much skill is required to make the recovery sure. "If in thawing them the utmost care is not taken to thaw gradually, and at a temperature always below the natural temperature of the living animal, the fluids will pass from the frozen state through the aqueous into the pectous so rapidly that death from pectous change will be pronounced without perceiving any intermediate or life stage at all." Naturally it is much more difficult to restore life in the case of warmblooded animals. Indeed, Dr. Richardson remarks, that in the case of the more complex and differently shielded organs of warm-blooded animals, it is next to impossible to thaw equally and simultaneously all the colloidal fluids. "In very young animals it can be done. Young kittens, a day or two old, that have been drowned in ice-cold water, will recover after two hours' immersion, almost to a certainty, if brought into dry air at a temperature of 98 degrees Fahrenheit. The gentlest motion of the body will be sufficient to restart the respiration, and therewith the life.”

Remarking on such cases as these, Dr. Richardson notes that the nearest natural approach to the stage of passive efficiency

is seen in hibernating animals. He states, however, that in hibernation the complete state of passive efficiency is not produced. He does not accept the opinion of those who consider that in true hibernation breathing ceases as above described. A slow respiration continues, he believes, as well as that low stage of active efficiency of circulation which we have already indicated. "The hibernating animal sleeps only; and while sleeping it consumes or wastes; and if the cold be prolonged it may die from waking." More decisive, because surer, is the evidence derived from the possibility of waking the hibernating animals by the common methods used for waking a sleeper. This certainly seems to show that animation is not positively suspended.

He asks next the question whether an animal like a fish, frozen equally through all its structures, is to be regarded as actually dead in the strict sense of the word or not, seeing that if it be uniformly and equally thawed it may recover from this perfectly frozen state. "In like manner," he says, "it may be doubted whether a healthy warm-blooded animal suddenly and equally frozen through all its parts is dead, although it is not recoverable." If, as seems certainly to be the case, the animal dies because in the very act of trying to restore it some inequality in the process is almost sure to determine a fatal issue, some vital centre passing into the pectous state, the animal could not have been dead before respiration was attempted; for the dead cannot die again. Albeit, the outlook is not encouraging, at any rate so far as the use of cold alone for maintaining suspended animation in full-grown warm-blooded animals is concerned. Cold will, however, for a long time maintain ready for motion active organs locally subject to it. Even after death this effect of cold" may be locally demonstrated," Dr. Richardson tells us," and has sometimes been so demonstrated to the wonder of the world. world. For instance, on January 17th, in the year 1803, Aldini, the nephew of Galvani, created the greatest astonishment in London by a series of experiments which he conducted on a malefactor, twenty-six years old, named John Forster, who was executed at Newgate, and whose body, an hour after execution,

was delivered over to Mr. Keate, Master of the College of Surgeons, for research. The body had been exposed for an hour to an atmosphere two degrees below freezing-point, and from that cause, though Aldini does not seem to have recognized the fact, the voluntary muscles retained their irritability to such a degree that when Aldini began to pass voltaic currents through the body, some of the bystanders seem to have concluded that the unfortunate malefactor had come again to life. It is significant also that Aldini in his report says that his object was not to produce reanimation, but to obtain a practical knowledge how far galvanism might be employed as an auxiliary to revive persons who were accidentally suffocated, as though he himself were in some doubt"—that is, not in doubt only about the power of galvanism, but in doubt whether Forster had been restored to life for a while or not Dr. Richardson has himself repeated, on lower animals, these experiments of Aldini's, except that the animals on which he has experimented have passed into death under chloroform, not through suffocation. His object, in fact, was to determine the best treatment for human beings who sink under chloroform and other anæsthetics. He finds that in warm weather he fails to get the same results. Noticing this, he says, "I experimented at and below the freezing-point, and then found that, both by the electrical discharge, and by injection of water heated to 130 degrees" (again this terrible inexactness of expression) "into the muscles through the arteries, active muscular movements could be produced in warm-blooded animals many hours after death. Thus, for lecture experiment, I have removed one muscle from the body of an animal that had slept to death from chloroform, and putting the muscle in a glass tube surrounded with ice and salt, I have kept it for several days in a condition for its making a final muscular contraction, and, by gently thawing it, have made it, in the act of final contraction, do some mechanical work, such as moving a long needle on the face of a dial, or discharging a pistol. In muscles so removed from the body and preserved ready for motion there is, however, only one final act. For as the blood and nervous supply are both cut

off from it, there is nothing left in it but the reserved something that was fixed by the cold. But I do not see any reason why this should not be maintained in reservation for weeks or months, as easily as for days, in a fixed cold atmosphere.

"

Cold being, however, obviously insufficient of itself for the suspension of active life in warm-blooded animals, at least if such life is eventually to be restored, let us next consider some of the agencies which either alone or aided by cold may suspend without destroying life.

The first known of all such agencies was mandragora. Dioscorides describes a wine, called morion, which was made from the leaves and the root of mandragora, and possessed properties resembling those of chloral hydrate. That it must have been an effective narcotic is shown by the circumstance that painful operations were performed on patients subjected to its influence, without their suffering the least pain, or even feeling. The sleep thus produced lasted several hours. Dr. Richardson considers that the use of this agent was probably continued until the twelfth or thirteenth century. "From the use of it doubtless came," he says, "the Shakespearian legend of Juliet. He strangely omits to notice that Shakespeare elsewhere speaks of this narcotic by name, where Iago says of Othello :

66 Not poppy, nor mandragora, Nor all the drowsy syrups of the world, Shall ever med'cine thee to that sweet sleep Which thou own'dst yesterday." Probably the use of mandragora as a narcotic may have continued much later than the thirteenth century. In earlier times it was certainly used as opium is now used, not for medicinal purposes, but to produce for a while an agreeable sensation of dreamy drowsiness. "There were those," says Dr. Richardson, in his interesting article on Narcotics in the Contemporary Review for July last, who drank of it for taste or pleasure, and who were spoken of as mandragorites,' as we might speak of alcoholists' or 'chloralists. They passed into the land of sleep and dream, and waking up in scare and alarm were the screaming mandrakes of an ancient civilization." He has himself made the "morion" of the ancients, dispensing the prescription of Dioscorides and

66

Pliny. "The same chemist, Mr. Hanbury," he says, "who first put chloral into my hands for experiment, also procured for me the root of the true mandragora. From that root I made the morion, tested it on myself, tried its effects, and re-proved, after a lapse perhaps of four or five centuries, that it had all the properties originally ascribed to it."

The deadly nightshade" has similar properties. (In fact, morion was originally made from the Atropa belladonna, not from its ally the Atropa mandragora.) In 1851 Dr. Richardson attended two children who were poisoned for a time from eating the berries and chewing the leaves of the nightshade, which they had gathered near Richmond. They were brought home insensible, he says, and they lay in a condition of suspended life for seven hours, the greatest care being required to detect either the respiration or the movements of the heart; they nevertheless recovered."

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With the nitrite of amyl, Dr. Richardson has suspended the life of a frog for nine days, yet the creature was then restored to full and vigorous life. He has shown also that the same power of suspension, though in less degree, "could be produced in warm-blooded animals, and that the heart of a warm-blooded animal would contract for a period of eighteen hours after apparent death." The action of nitrite of amyl seems to semble that of cold. In the pleasing language of the doctors, "it prevents the pectous change of colloidal matter, and so prevents rigor mortis, coagulation of blood, and solidification of nervous centres and cords." So long as this change is prevented, active life can be restored. But when in these experiments the pectous change occurred, all was over, and resolution into new forms of matter by putrefaction was the result." From the analogy of some of the symptoms resulting from the use of nitrite of amyl with the symptoms of catalepsy, Dr. Richardson has "ventured to suggest that under some abnormal conditions the human body itself, in its own chemistry, may produce an agent which causes the suspended life observed during the cataleptic condition." The suggestion has an interest apart from the question of the possibility of safely sus

pending animation for considerable periods of time it might be possible to detect the nature of the agent thus produced by the chemistry of the human body (if the theory is correct), and thus to learn how its power might be counteracted.

Chloral hydrate seems singularly efficient in producing the semblance of death --so completely, indeed, as to deceive even the elect. Dr. Richardson states that at the meeting of the British Association at Exeter some pigeons, which had been put to sleep by the needle injection of a large dose of chloral," fell into such complete resemblance of death that they passed for dead among an audience containing many physiologists and other men of science. For my own part," he proceeds, "I could detect no sign of life in them, and they were laid in one of the out-offices of the museum of the infirmary as dead. In this condition they were left late at night, but in the following morning they were found alive, and as well as if nothing hurtful had happened to them." Similar effects seem to be produced by the deadly poisons cyanogen gas and hydrocyanic acid, though in the following case, narrated by Dr. Richardson, the animal experimented upon (not with the idea of eventually restoring it to life) belonged to a race so specially tenacious of life that some may consider only one of its proverbial nine lives to have been affected. In the laboratory of a large drug establishment a cat, "by request of its owner, was killed, as was assumed, instantaneously and painlessly by a large dose of Scheele's acid. The animal appeared to die without a pang, and, presenting every appearance of death, was laid in a sink to be removed on the next morning. At night the animal was lying still in form of death in the tank beneath a tap. In the morning it was found alive and well, but with the fur wet from the dropping of water from the tap." This fact was communicated to Dr. Richardson by an eminent chemist under whose direct observation it occurred, in corroboration of an observation of his own similar in character.

Our old friend alcohol (if friend it can be called) possesses the power of suspending active vitality without destroying life, or at any rate without depriving