Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 3.djvu/284

272 in death from old age, in that occasioned by disease, and in sudden death.

The man who expires at the close of a long decline in years, dies in detail. All his senses in succession are sealed. Sight becomes dim and unsteady, and at last loses the picture of objects. Hearing grows gradually insensible to sounds. Touch is blunted into dulness, odors produce but a weak impression, only taste lingers a little. At the same time that the organs of sensation waste and lose their excitability, the functions of the brain fade out little by little. Imagination becomes unfixed, memory nearly fails, judgment wavers. Further, motions are slow and difficult on account of stiffness in the muscles; the voice breaks; in short, all the functions of outward life lose their spring. Each of the bonds attaching the old man to existence parts by slow degrees. Yet the internal life persists. Nutrition still takes place, but very soon the forces desert the most essential organs. Digestion languishes, the secretions dry up, capillary circulation is clogged: that of the large vessels in their turn is checked, and, at last, the heart's contractions cease. This is the instant of death. The heart is the last thing to die. Such is the series of slow and partial deaths which, with the old man spared by disease, result in the last end of all. The individual who falls into the sleep of eternity in these conditions, dies like the vegetable which, having no consciousness of life, can have no consciousness of death. He passes insensibly from one to the other, and to die thus is to know no pain. The thought of the last hour alarms us only because it puts a sudden end to our relations with all our surroundings; but, if the feeling of these relations has long ago faded away, there can be no place for fear at the brink of the grave. The animal does not tremble in the instant before it ceases to be.

Unfortunately, death of this kind is very rare for humanity. Death from old age has become an extraordinary phenomenon. Most commonly we succumb to a disturbance in the functions of our vital system, which is sometimes sudden, sometimes gradual. In this case, as in the former one, we observe animal life disappearing first, but the modes of its conclusion are infinitely varied. One of the most usual is death through the lungs; as a result of pneumonia and different forms of phthisis, the oxidation of the blood becoming impossible on account of the disorganization of the pulmonary globules, venous blood goes back to the heart without gaining revivification. In the case of serious and prolonged fevers, and of infectious diseases, whether epidemic or otherwise, which are, characteristically, blood-poisonings, death occurs through a general change in nutrition. This is still more the fact as to death consequent upon certain chronic disorders of the digestive organs. When these are affected, the secretion of those juices fitted to dissolve food dries up, and these fluids go through the intestinal canal unemployed. In this case the invalid dies of real