There is a special peril in the dissection of dead bodies, around which floats so destructive an atmosphere. Some valuable lives of professional men have been lost, through the injury inflicted by a mere puncture with some instrument which had just been used in such anatomical investigations. In the bite of a mad dog, the mischief proceeds not from any natural fury of the animal, but only from an accidental malady, and is not in proportion to the severity of the wound, but only to the malignity of the substance infused. It may properly be placed, therefore, not with other fatal injuries from beasts, but with fortuitous deaths from the communication of poisonous matter. Amongst the victims of hydrophobia the most distinguished, perhaps, was Charles, Duke of Richmond, who died in 1819, while he was Governor of Canada, having been bitten by a favourite dog which was often near his person. The blood, the nerves, the digestive organs, thus take up the seeds of death from a variety of substances; and man, with all his skill, cannot deliver his inmost frame from such enemies. They enter deeper into the secrets of nature than all his remedies or his knowledge. How amazing is that agency, and how far beyond all human discernment, through which one single drop received into the throat, a few grains deposited in the stomach, or a touch, and no more, reaching the blood-vessels, can prostrate the strongest form, defy all power of science, derange and absolutely dissolve the whole organization, drive the soul from its citadel, and rapidly convert the lifeless body into a mass of corruption! Nothing more clearly tells how fearfully and wonderfully we are made, and how manifold as well as mighty, are the means which obey the divine decrees, of judg ment or of mercy. except when they The men who die by these poisons, are administered by the hand of suicide or of murder, are very few; only enough to remind the rest that all nature can become the armoury of death. XVII. Death from Atmospheric "On every nerve 'The deadly winter seizes; shuts up sense; THOMSON. Two dreadful extremes, the heat that consumes, and the cold that congeals, threaten on either side the life of man, which commonly vibrates between them, at a secure distance. From the violence of the burning sun he shelters himself beneath the shade of roofs, trees, or rocks; and against the biting blasts he protects himself with the aid of fire, thick raiment, and continual exercise. But sometimes he is found unprepared, or is drawn forth from his refuge, and falls under the might of a natural force, which he was not framed to encounter. The air, too, which he breathes, may, through the accumulation of noxious vapours in close pits and depths, be so deprived of the just proportion of its vital elements, that to inhale it is to be suffocated. Exposed without defence to the vehement heat of the sun, especially in the warmer latitudes, men have often dropped down, and survived but a few moments. A regiment of Prussians, in 1848, suffered as great a loss in this manner as would have been caused by a sharp skirmish. At the battle of Monmouth, several soldiers died merely from the heat; and General Greene, outliving the war, was afterwards smitten with a fatal sun-stroke on his plantation. Labourers in the fields have thus fallen in the season of harvest; and workmen on the roofs of houses have felt their life melting away beneath the blazing noon. But this is an uncommon fate; and the destructive power of extreme heat is more often exercised through exhalations and consequent pestilences, through drought and through the fiery blasts, that send the sands of the desert in whirlwinds against the caravan. The bones of men lie strewed along the plains where such whirlwinds have passed. More directly destructive is the violence of cold. Every severe storm of the Northern winters surprises some wanderers, who may easily perish amidst the bewildering snows and the benumbing frost. The shipwrecked sailor sometimes escapes the rocks and waves, only to die frozen upon the shore. The squadrons of Charles the Twelfth and the legions of Napoleon sank in long files before the sharp winds of Russia. One of the earlier English navigators, Sir Hugh Willoughby, in the time of Elizabeth, was frozen to death with all his crew in the Arctic sea of Europe; and it is said that a Greenland whaler was found, about 1780, wedged in the ice, where she had been fastened some fifteen years before, with all on board in the very attitude in which they had died, stiff and undecayed. An accident, not unfrequent and very distressing, is the destruction of the lives of sleepers through the change in the air which they breathe, produced by the fumes of charcoal, where there is no chimney or other outlet. The effect of the respiration of a numerous company, crowded for a long time into a very close room, would be almost as fatal: and thus the hundred and twentythree British sufferers in the Black Hole at Calcutta were suffocated by the change in an air in which a few of them could have easily borne their imprisonment. In the same manner, seventy or eighty Irish passengers in a steamer died dreadfully under the hatches, where they had been crowded during a storm. In pits and wells a noxious gas is sometimes formed, which becomes almost instantaneously fatal to the explorer; so that man after man has been lowered only to die in the attempt to rescue his predecessor. Such gases were found to be pent up in the earth so intensely, that often, when the miner has opened a passage, they have rushed forth, either stifling the unfortunate company, or taking fire at their torches, and wrapping all in destruction. Science has found preservatives; but in these more hidden places, nature will doubtless retain some stores of elemental ammunition, ready for mortal explosion. Many hundreds have thus perished in England within a single season. The rapid dissolution of men in vast companies, when Providence visits them with fatal judgments, is usually through some agency which takes the form of an actual disease, however sudden and speedy. But when, in one night, a hundred and eighty-five thousand Assyrians were smitten by the destroying angel, this can hardly have been through any operation of the most violent and infectious malady, but probably through some such miraculous change in the surrounding atmosphere as made it death to breathe. Thus the very means of life become the means of death. Man, since the sentence under which he dies, |