Page:Physiological Researches upon Life and Death.djvu/321

Rh in the muscles of the two lives; galvanic susceptibility remains to a considerable degree in those of animal life.

This permanence of organic properties, is nearly the same in all cases; the only circumstance which can create a difference, is the more or less tardy manner in which the animal has perished. The more rapid death has been, the more powerful is the contractibility, and the longer is it in disappearing. On the contrary, the more slowly the organs have ceased their functions, the less susceptible is this property of being excited to action.

In the duration of the phenomena which precede general death by that of the brain, cæteris paribus, experiments upon contractibility always present nearly the same result, because the connexion of these phenomena and the immediate cause which produces them also remain always nearly the same. Apoplexy, commotion, inflammation, violent compression of the brain, a division of the spinal marrow under the occipital, compression by a luxation of the vertebrae, &c. are remote causes very different in themselves, but all which produce a uniform proximate cause.

It is not the same in asphixia by the different gases, a disease after the termination of which the state of contractibility varies very much, though often the duration of the phenomena of death has been similar. This, as we have seen, depends upon the diversity of the nature of the poisons, which are introduced by the air-passages, and carried by the circulation to the different organs, which they affect more or less feebly and directly.

The state of the lungs varies considerably in the bodies of those whose death has had its principle in the brain. Sometimes replete, and sometimes void of blood, it generally points out, acccordingaccording [sic] to these two states, whether the cessation of the functions has been gradual, and whether consequently the blow has not suddenly destroyed the