[3]. Tractat. de Peste Lib. iv. Hist. 85.
[4]. In returning, the ship was cast away on the island of Zante, when this unfortunate philosopher perished from hunger.
[5]. Bruhier, John, a physician at Paris, in the middle of the seventeenth century; he was author of many works, but his principal celebrity rested on his warnings against burying persons, supposed to be dead, too early. “Dissertation sur l’Incertitude des signes de la Mort et l’abus des enterremens, et embaumemens precipites.” Paris, 1742. He was at the pains of collecting histories of persons who had revived after being supposed to be dead, some of whom had been buried. Bodies ought not to be interred, he says, until putrefaction has commenced. “Memoire sur la necessité d’un Reglement general au sujet des enterremens.” 1745. No one should be buried until the fourth day from their dying. “Addition aux Memoires,” &c. in which he adds to the number of examples of persons who had been buried alive, or had revived after being interred. These works have passed through numerous editions, and have been translated into several other European languages.
[6]. Horrible as it may appear, it was a custom in Persia, at the time that Herodotus wrote, of burying alive; and this historian was informed that Amestris, the wife of Xerxes, when she was far advanced in age, commanded fourteen Persian children of illustrious birth to be interred alive, in honour of the Deity whom they supposed to exist under the earth.—Polyhymnia, c. xiv.
[7]. “A Dissertation on the Disorder of Death, or that state of the frame under the signs of Death, called Suspended Animation,” by the Rev. Walter Whiter, Rector of Hardingham. Norwich, 1819. 8vo.
[8]. Plin. Nat. Hist. Lib. vii, c. 52; see also Valer. Maxim. Lib. 1, c. 8. For extraordinary histories of persons roused from the tomb, see Diemerbroeck, Lib, ii; Joannes Mathæus, Quæst. Med.; Hildanus Cent. 2. Obs. 95, 96; Phillip Salmuth Cent. 2, Obs. 86, 87, 95. Maximilian Misson relates in his voyages many curious cases of this kind. “Nouveau Voyage d’Italie.” But the works of Bruhier, before mentioned, contain the greatest collection of such anecdotes.
[9]. Thus in the Greek, the most philosophically constructed language with which we are acquainted, the alpha and omega, the first and last acts of life, are conveyed in the verb αω spiro compounded of those letters. In Latin we also find spiro and spiritus.
[10]. Lettres sur la certitude des signes de la mort.
[11]. Recherches Physiologiques sur la Vie et la Mort.
[12]. Phil. Trans. 1811.