plish there their terrible work of dissolution. The Emperor John Comnenus was mortally wounded while he was hunting, by a poisoned arrow. A fatal quantity of some powerful drug, of which a little might preserve life, but much must destroy it, has sometimes been administered through the error of a nurse or attendant; and sometimes, that of the apothecary, the friend or the patient himself has substituted a poison for a remedy. Archbishop Stuart, son of the celebrated Earl of Bute, died from swallowing an embrocation which had been. given him by mistake for a medicine. The beautiful poetess best known under her maiden name of Landon, appears to have heedlessly used a greater quantity of prussic acid than was her perilous custom, and was found dead, alone, in her chamber, at Cape Coast Castle. An apothecary in one of the Southern States, on the representation that he had perhaps sent a draught which he did not intend, was so confident of his correctness that he offered to swallow the draught, and actually destroyed himself by his rashness.

It is common to hear of those who, having mistaken the poisonous toadstool for the rich mushroom, have brought death into a family at a repast. Children and domestics have lighted upon arsenic which had been carelessly deposited within their reach, and have tasted it fatally, or, perhaps, mingled it accidentally with the food of a household. Diseases in the flesh of animals have been known to cause qualities so poisonous, that those who partook of the flesh, after the animal was slain, have sickened and died.

It has sometimes happened, that very slight wounds have spread, in an inexplicable manner, some strange effect, like that of venom, throughout the system.

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
Extremes.

« On every nerve

The deadly winter seizes; shuts up sense;
And, o'er his inmost vitals creeping cold,

Lays him along the snows, a stiffened corse,
Stretched out, and bleaching in the northern blast.”

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,