eight-and-forty, seventy-two, or at most
ninety-six hours after death. And, considering
the length of time that trances,
catalepsies, lethargies, and cases of
suspended animation have been known
occasionally to continue, it is scarcely in
England less interesting to us, though public
feeling, which is only an expression of
natural affection, approves, and indeed almost
compels, a longer delay. The attention of
the French government being once more
directed to the subject, there is little doubt
that all reasonable grounds for fear will be
removed.

The petitioners have requested, as a
precaution, that all burials, for the future,
should, in the first instance, be only
provisional. Before filling a grave, a
communication is to be made between the coffin and
the upper atmosphere, by means of a respiratory
tube; and the grave is not to be finally
closed until all hope of life is abandoned.
These precautions, it will be seen at once,
however good in theory, are scarcely
practicable. Others have demanded the general
establishment of mortuary chambers, or
dead-houses, like those in Germany. And
not only the petitioners, but several senators,
seem to consider that measure the full
solution of the problem. Article 77 of the
Civil Code prescribes a delay of twenty-
four hours only; which appears to them to
be insufficient. Science, they urge, admits
the certainty that death has taken place,
only after putrefactive decomposition has set
in. Now, a much longer time than twenty-
four hours may elapse before that
decomposition manifests itself. Deposit,
therefore, your dead in a mortuary chapel until
you are perfectly sure, from the evidence
of your senses, that life is utterly and
hopelessly extinct.

In Germany, coffins, with the corpses
laid out in them, are placed in a building
where a keeper watches day and night.
During the forty years that this system
has been in force, not a single case of
apparent death has been proved to occur.
This negative result cannot be cited as
conclusive, either for or against the system.
In a country where a million of people
annually die, an experiment embracing
only forty-six thousand corpses, is too
partial to be relied on as evidence. Moreover,
mortuary chambers exist only in a
few great centres of population; and it is
especially in small towns and country
districts, where medical men are too busy to
inspect the dead, that premature interments
are to be apprehended.

Out of Germany, as in England and
France, there might be a great difficulty in
getting the population to accept and make
use of mortuary chambers. And even if
favourably looked upon in large cities, the
rich, as in Germany, would refuse to expose
their dead there to the public gaze. In the
country and in isolated villages the plan
would be impossible to carry out. M.
Henri de Parville, while announcing the
existence of an infallible test for
distinguishing apparent from real death, protests
that to wait until a body falls into decomposition,
is just as opposed to French
habits, to hygiène, and to the public health,
as mortuary chambers are unacceptable by
the public in general. He holds that the
legislature has already adopted the wiser
and more practical measure. The
permission to inter a corpse cannot be granted
until the civil officer has gone to see the
body of the deceased. When the Article 77
of the Civil Code was under discussion by
the Council of State, Fourcroy added: "It
shall be specified that the civil officer be
assisted by an officer de santé— a medical
man of inferior rank to a doctor of
medicine-- because there are cases in which
it is difficult to make certain that death
has actually occurred, without a thorough
knowledge of its symptoms, and because
there are tolerably numerous examples to
prove that people have been buried alive."
In Paris, especially since Baron Haussmann's
administration, Article 77 has been
strictly fulfilled; but the same exactitude
cannot be expected in out-of-the-way nooks
and corners of the country, where a doctor
cannot always be found, at a minute's
warning, to declare whether death be real
or apparent only. It is clear that the legislature
has hit upon the sole indisputable
practical solution; the difficulty lies in its
rigorous and efficient application.

It has been judiciously remarked that it
would be a good plan to spread the
knowledge of the sure and certain characteristics
which enable us to distinguish every form
of lethargy from real death. It cannot be
denied that, at the present epoch, the utmost
pains are taken to popularise every kind of
knowledge. Nevertheless, it makes slow
way through the jungles of prejudice and
vulgar error. Not long ago, it was over
and over again asserted that an infallible
mode of ascertaining whether a person were
dead or not, was to inflict a burn on the
sole of the foot. If a blister full of water
resulted, the individual was not dead; if
the contrary happened, there was no further