knees, in the act of drawing; by swallowing pins; by the pressure of a cat on the breast of an infant; by a sudden check in riding or running; by every variety of incident, the common doom has at one time or another been executed. Bishop Kidder was killed in his bed, and his wife with him, by the fall of a stack of chimneys, in a great tempest. Anacreon is said to have been choked by a grape-stone; Pope Adrian the Fourth, by a fly. The pressure of a crowd has crushed multitudes besides the nobleman in the gate of Samaria. It is probable, that at least one death in fifty may be the result of some fatal casualty.

XXI.

Death from Defective Organization.

"Short was thy span; but Heaven, whose wise decrees
Had made that shortened span one long disease,

In chastening merciful, gave ample scope

For mild, redeeming virtues, faith and hope,
Meek resignation, pious charity;

And, since this world was not the world for thee,
Far from thy path removed, with watchful care,
Fame, glory, gain, and pleasure's flowery snare;
Bade earth's temptations pass thee harmless by,
And fixed on heaven thine unaverted eye."

CANNING.

SOME of the children of men are born with frames so deficient in some of the common requisites to the preservation of animal life, that they are necessarily doomed to an early dissolution. These die, often in the earliest months of their existence; sometimes, after lin-、 gering in much suffering through several years; sometimes, when the defect is less important, after they have been preserved with care to a much later period. In these, the general law of mortality has taken the form of a special provision, to be effectual in the defective part of the organization.

Not unfrequently the mind is, through the same cause, incapable of much development. In mountainous countries, like the Swiss Valais, are found those decrepit cretins, whose bodies are so painfully misshapen, while their intellect is more or less sunken in a state approaching idiocy. With such, it would be strange if life could reach its common limits. Where the organi

zation of the brain is defective, all nervous action suffers; and the point at which the vital principle is in contact with matter becomes liable to destructive influences from every side. Where the heart is marked by some malformation, the circulation must always labour, till the organs give way, or become exhausted and stand still. Where the lungs or the digestive functions are originally imperfect, the life must be imperfectly indued with the power of self-preservation. When a defect or deformity is external, we perceive its injurious operation; but this is only the mightier when all is within. Not dissimilar to these appear some instances in which the connection between the vital principle and the bodily organization seemed singularly easy of rupture. In July, 1846, a young lady died suddenly at Cincinnati, apparently from excessive heat. The next day, her sister died in the same manner, on her return from the burial; and a third sister, on the third day, returning from the second burial, died also in the carriage. It appeared, on an inquest in England, that sixteen persons of one family had, at different times, died of bleeding, without having received any serious injuries.

With malformation of the system must be closely associated that hereditary transmission of early and fatal disease, which makes of death, not a mere submission to the universal law, not an accidentally premature occurrence, but a necessary result of specific causes born in the individual. Scrofulous affections, and an inevitable tendency to consumption, are sometimes so planted from the birth, that children, and even families of children, descend, without any other than this original cause, and notwithstanding every preventive measure, to the grave of their kindred, before they can attain the strength of maturity. It would be indeed a melan

choly sight, were the human destiny limited to this life, and were not the very scene of early death so often the scene of the purest triumphs of hope over sorrow and suffering.

Among those who are thus marked from the first, although often there may be no outward, at least, no decisive sign, names of celebrity cannot, of course, be recorded. But parents have thus outlived a large circle, amongst whom their hopes were once divided, till, while one after another fell like the blossoms in spring, they have felt it as a providential appointment that they themselves should die alone. At other times, the children have been early deprived of their parents, and reserved only for a short orphanhood, and the inheritance of that peculiar fragility that could not pass beyond a single generation. If the world has felt less of interest in such deaths, as such lives may have seemed to promise it less of vigorous operation, yet they have been the centres of an unspeakable mass of private and domestic feeling.

It is not always true, on the other hand, that the imperfections of the bodily organization, or its seeds of innate disease, have made the intellect feeble or languid. The very cause which has shortened the days has sometimes given them a wonderful brilliancy. That common class of proverbs, which, in all ages, have assigned a brief date to powers singularly developed, have their foundation. Some of the extraordinary instances of mental precocity which have delighted or amazed mankind, and ceased with an early death, have been, no doubt, connected with strong tendencies to disease of the brain, or to a development unequal, and therefore irregular and dangerous.

It would be very affecting, could we see the process

by which so many emphatically begin to die when they begin to live. As in a defective piece of mechanism, the absence or weakness of one part is the occasion of a continual strain upon others, or of an imperfect action of the whole. All is thus weakened by degrees, even while the natural accessions of force, as the system grows towards maturity, furnish some counteraction. The struggle between the powers of life and the deficiency of their instruments is vainly prolonged; for the deficiency is one which no possible addition to the strength of any other quarter could overcome. At length, the encroachments of disease are manifest: the enfeebled frame gives up its painful resistance; some accident, perhaps, however trivial, hastens the fatal progress; and the life which never knew health, is closed.