hope. This error was unhesitatingly
accepted as an item of the popular creed.

The Council of Hygiène, applied to by
the government, indicated putrefaction and
cadaverous rigidity as infallible signs of
actual death. In respect to the first,
putrefaction, a professional man is not likely to
make a mistake; but nothing is more
possible than for non-professionals to confound
hospital rottenness, gangrene, with true
post-mortem putrefaction. M. de Parville
declines to admit it as a test adapted for
popular application. Moreover, in winter,
the time required for putrefaction to
manifest itself is extremely uncertain.

The cadaverous rigidity, the stiffness of
a corpse, offers an excellent mode of verifying
death; but its value and importance
are not yet appreciable by everybody, or
by the first comer. Cadaverous rigidity
occurs a few hours after death; the limbs,
hitherto supple, stiffen; and it requires a
certain effort to make them bend. But
when once the faculty of bending a joint
is forcibly restored—to the arm, for
instance—it will not stiffen again, but will
retain its suppleness. If the death be real,
the rigidity is overcome once for all. But
if the death be only apparent, the limbs
quickly resume, with a sudden and jerking
movement, the contracted position which
they previously occupied. The stiffness
begins at the top, the head and neck, and
descends gradually to the trunk.

These characteristics are very clearly
marked; but they must be caught in the
fact, and at the moment of their
appearance: because, after a time, of
variable duration, they disappear. The
contraction of the members no longer
exists, and the suppleness of the joints
returns. Many other symptoms might be
added to the above; but they demand still
greater clearness of perception, more
extended professional knowledge, and more
practised habits of observation.

Although the French Government is
anxious to enforce throughout the whole
Empire, the rules carried out in Paris, it is
to be feared that great difficulties lie in the
way. The verification of deaths on so
enormous a scale, with strict minuteness,
is almost impracticable. But even if it
were not, many timid persons would say:
"Who is to assure us of the correctness of
the doctors' observations? Unfortunately,
too many terrible examples of their
fallibility are on record. The professional man
is pressed for time. He pays a passing
visit, gives a hurried glance; and a fatal
mistake is so easily made!" Public opinion
will not be reassured until you can show,
every time a death occurs, an irrefutable
demonstration that life has departed.

M. de Parville now announces the possibility
of this great desideratum. He professes
to place in any one's hands, a self-
acting apparatus, which would declare, not
only whether the death be real, but would
leave in the hands of the experimenter a
written proof of the reality of the death.
The scheme is this: It is well known that
atrophine—the active principle of belladonna—
possesses the property of considerably
dilating the pupil of the eye. Oculists
constantly make use of it, when they want
to perform an operation, or to examine the
interior of the eye. Now, M. le Docteur
Bouchut has shown that atrophine has no
action on the pupil when death is real. In
a state of lethargy, the pupil, under the
influence of a few drops of atrophine,
dilates in the course of a few minutes; the
dilatation also takes place a few instants
after death; but it ceases absolutely in a
quarter of an hour, or half an hour at the
very longest; consequently, the enlargement
of the pupil is a certain sign that death
is only apparent.

This premised, imagine a little camera-
obscura, scarcely so big as an opera-glass,
containing a slip of photographic paper,
which is kept unrolling for five-and-twenty
or thirty minutes by means of clockwork.
This apparatus, placed a short distance in
front of the dead person's eye, will depict
on the paper the pupil of the eye, which
will have been previously moistened with
a few drops of atrophine. It is evident
that, as the paper slides before the eye of
the corpse, if the pupil dilate, its
photographic image will be dilated; if, on the
contrary, it remains unchanged, the image
will retain its original size.  An inspection
of the paper then enables the experimenter
to read upon it whether the death is real or
apparent only. This sort of declaration
can be handed to the civil officer, who will
give a permit to bury, in return.

By this simple method a hasty or careless
certificate of death becomes impossible.
The instrument applies the test, and counts
the minutes. The doctor and the civil
officer are relieved from further responsibility.
The paper gives evidence that the
verification has actually and carefully been
made; for, suppose that half an hour is
required to produce a test that can be relied
on, the length of the strip of paper unrolled,
marks the time during which the experiment