Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 3.djvu/286

274 at least, in chronic maladies, and especially in those that consume the human body slowly and silently. Yet, when the hour of death comes for ardent organizations—for great artists, for instance, and they usually die young—there is a quick and sublime new burst of life in the creative genius. There is no better example of this than the angelic end of Beethoven, who, before he breathed out his soul, that tuneful monad, regained his lost speech and hearing, and spent them in repeating for the last time some of those sweet harmonies which he called his "Prayers to God." Some diseases, moreover, are most peculiarly marked by the gentleness of the dying agony. Of all the ills that cheat us while killing by pin-pricks, consumption is that which longest wears for us the illusive look of health, and best conceals the misery of living and the horror of dying. Nothing can be compared with that hallucination of the senses and that liveliness of hope which mark the last days of the consumptive. He takes the burning of his destroying fever for a healthful symptom, he forms his plans, and smiles calmly and cheerfully on his friends, and suddenly, some morrow of a quiet night, he falls into the sleep that never wakes.

If life is everywhere, and if, consequently, death occurs everywhere, in all the elements of the system, what must be thought of that point in the spinal marrow which a famous physiologist styled the vital knot, and in which he professed to lodge the principle of life itself? The point which Flourens regarded as this vital knot is situated nearly at the middle of the prolonged spinal cord—that is, the middle of that portion of the nerve-substance which connects the brain with the spinal marrow. This region, in fact, has a fine and dangerous excitability. A prick, or the penetration of a needle into it, is enough to cause the instant death of any animal whatever. It is the very means used in physiological laboratories to destroy life swiftly and surely in dogs. That susceptibility is explained in the most natural way. This spot is the starting-point of the nerves that go to the lungs; the moment that the slighest injury is produced in it, there follows a check on the movements of respiration, and ensuing death. This vital knot of Flourens enjoys no sort of special prerogative. Life is not more concentrated nor more essential in it than elsewhere; it simply coincides with the initial point of the nerves animating one of the organs indispensable to vitality, the organ of sanguification; and in living organisms any alteration of the nerves controlling a function brings a serious risk as to its complete performance. There is, therefore, no such thing as a vital knot, a central fire of life in animals. They are collections of an infinity of infinitely small living creatures, and each one of these microscopic living points is its own life-centre for itself. Each on its own account grows, produces heat, and displays those characteristic activities which depend upon its structure. Each one, by virtue of a preëstablished harmony, meets all the rest in the