[27] It has been thought that Lieber's death was occasioned by rupture of the heart. See the last words of Charles Sumner and the foot note on his sudden death. See also the last words of John Palmer and the account of his death appended from the Annual Register.
[28] In the Last Journals the date is May 1st; on the stone, May 4th. The attendants could not quite determine the day.
[29] The section of the tree containing the inscription made by Jacob Wainwright has been brought to England and deposited in the house of the Geographical Society.
[30] To some of the most distinguished of our race death has come in the strangest possible way, and so grotesquely as to subtract greatly from the dignity of the sorrow it must certainly have occasioned. Æschylus, whose seventy tragedies, to say nothing of his many satiric dramas, have given their author an immortal name, was killed by the fall of a tortoise on his bald head from the talons of an eagle high in the air above him.
There was a singular propriety in the death of Anacreon by choking at a grape stone or a dried grape. The poet whose sweetest and most enticing lines celebrate wine and love came to his death at the ripe age of eighty-five from the fruit of the vine. Agathocles, the tyrant of Syracuse, was given by the treacherous Maenon a poisoned toothpick which soon rendered his mouth incurably gangrened, and deprived him of the power of speech. While in this miserable and helpless condition he was stretched upon the funeral pile and burned alive.
Fabius, the Roman praetor, died from the same cause that occasioned the death of Anacreon. A single goat hair in the milk he was drinking, lodged in his trachea and choked him. Chalchas, the soothsayer, outlived the time predicted for his death, which struck him as so comical that he burst into a fit of most immoderate laughter from which he died. Thus also died the famous Marquette, who was convulsed with a fatal merriment on seeing a monkey trying to pull on a pair of boots. Philomenes was seized with an equally disastrous merriment when he came suddenly upon an ass that was devouring with greediness the choice figs that had been prepared for his own desert.
Laughter killed the great Zeuxis, of whom Pliny relates the story of a trial of skill with the painter Parrhasius. The former painted a bunch of grapes that were so natural a bird endeavored to eat the fruit. Charles VIII., while gallantly conducting his queen into the tennis court, struck his head against the lintel and died soon after from the accident.
Frederick Lewis, Prince of Wales, was struck by a cricket ball, which caused his death. A pig occasioned the death of Louis VI., the creature ran under the monarch's horse causing it to stumble. But of all strange deaths that of Itadach is the strangest. He expired from thirst while toiling in the harvest field, because, in obedience to the rule of St. Patrick, he would not drink "a drop of anything."
[31] Her Will, by which her personalty, sworn under £10,000, is suitably divided among her brothers and sisters, an old servant, and a few friends, contains one peculiar provision which indicates the desire of the testatrix, even when dead, to benefit the living. "It is my desire," she says, "from an interest in the progress of scientific investigation, that my Skull should be given to Henry George Atkinson, of Upper Gloucester Place, London, and also my Brain, if my death should take place within such distance of his then present abode, as to enable him to have it for the purposes of scientific observation." By the second codicil, dated October 5th, 1872, this direction is revoked; "but," the codicil proceeds, "I wish to leave it on record that this alteration in my testamentary directions is not caused by any change of opinion as to the importance of scientific observation on such subjects, but is made in consequence merely of a change of circumstances in my individual case." The "circumstances" alluded to were doubtless these. When the removal of Miss Martineau to London took place, the "Burke and Hare" murders, and "body-snatching" generally, were the special horrors of the day. The only authorized supply of "subjects" for dissection was from the gallows; and philanthropic persons sought by selling the reversion of their bodies (a transaction which, legally, does not hold good), or like Jeremy Bentham, leaving them to some institution, or medical expert, by a special bequest (also nugatory), to dissolve the association of disgrace with the necessary procedure of dissection. The difficulty was, in great measure, relieved by the passing of Mr. Warburton's Bill; and hence the necessity for such an arrangement as that made by Miss Martineau ceased to exist. The singular provision, had however, become known; and shortly after the execution of the document, the testatrix received a letter from the celebrated aurist, Mr. Toynbee, asking her point-blank to bequeath him a "legacy of her ears." She had suffered from deafness all her life; a large amount of mischief and misery was caused by the ignorance of surgeons with regard to the auditory apparatus; and this ignorance could only be removed by such means as he proposed. The lady to whom this strange request was made, says with grim humour, that she felt "rather amused when she caught herself in a feeling of shame, as it were, at having only one pair of ears,—at having no duplicate for Mr. Toynbee, after having disposed otherwise of her skull." She, however, told him how the matter actually stood; and a meeting took place between the doctor and the legatee, "to ascertain whether one head could, in any way, be made to answer both their objects."
An autopsy of her body was eventually made by Dr. T. M. Greenhow, of Leeds; a full detail of the appearances at which will be found in the British Medical Journal, for April 14th, 1877, p. 449.—William Bates in "The Maclise Portrait Gallery."