[61]. This event occurred during the period of the author’s studies at Cambridge; and he can therefore offer his testimony to the truth of the statement; he visited the woman soon after her disinterment.
[62]. See Vol. i. p. 369.
[63]. Starving to death was a punishment inflicted by the people of Aragon, some years ago; and it is reported by Tavernier, that the chief ladies in the kingdom of Tonquin, are at this day starved to death for adultery. The severity of the Roman law on an unchaste Vestal has often exercised the pencil of the artist. An account of its execution on Rhea, marked as it always was by circumstances of peculiar horror and solemnity, is to be found in Plutarch’s Life of Numa; the offender, conducted by a mute procession across the Forum to the place of her interment near the Colline gate, was made to descend a ladder into the sepulchre, and left there with a lamp, a loaf of bread, and a cruse of water, the opening being immediately closed with earth and stones.
[64]. Corsican Gazette, and London Med. & Phys. Jour. March, 1822.
[65]. The siege of Jerusalem by the Romans will at once occur to the reader; and of which Josephus has left us so tragic a history: amongst other atrocities, an unhappy woman, reduced to the last extremity by pinching hunger, sacrifices the feelings of a mother to the voracious calls of appetite, butchers her child, and feeds upon the body!
[66]. See “Naufrage de la Frégate la Méduse, faisant partie de l’Expedition du Sénégal en 1816,” par F. B. Savigny, ex Chirurgien de la Marine, et Alexandre Corréard, Ingénieur-Geographe. Paris, 1817.—A very interesting account of this narrative may be found in the Quarterly Review, for October, 1817.
[67]. That which we call duration is in fact a feeling of succession, and is computed by the number of ideas that pass through the mind; whenever an event occurs which powerfully excites the attention of an observer, he watches the most minute change, whence he believes that the time which elapses before the whole event is completed, appears to be unusually prolonged. When the infidel sultan of Egypt refused to believe that Mahomet could have ascended into the seven heavens, and have held some thousand conferences with the Almighty in the space of a few minutes, the learned mussulman, who was consulted on the occasion, endeavoured to turn his Majesty to a more strict faith, by demonstrating to him that a short period of time became converted into a long one, when a great multitude of important events were crouded into it.
[68]. In a tract entitled “Observations on Animal Life and Apparent Death, by John Franks, surgeon, 8vo. London, 1790,” the author says that “when the late Mr. Justamond (Surgeon to the Middlesex hospital) lived on the terrace, Palace yard, Westminster, a boy who had been drowned in the Thames was brought to him; he made an opening into the wind-pipe, in order to inflate the lungs; but the discharge of blood which ensued was such as gave him no chance of succeeding in the recovery; for he could not prevent the blood from pouring down into the lungs.” Although, says Dr. Currie, nothing is said in this case about the pulse, yet from the blood flowing so copiously, there is reason to believe that the heart had begun to act; and therefore to conclude, that life was in fact destroyed by this operation, which might have been saved without it. See “Observations on Apparent Death from Drowning, Hanging, Suffocation by noxious vapours, &c.” by James Currie, M.D. London, 1815.
[69]. The first body galvanised in this country was that of the malefactor George Foster, who was executed in January 1803, before Newgate, for the murder of his wife and infant daughter, by drowning them in the Paddington Canal; the experiment was conducted under the direction of Aldini, the nephew of Galvani.
[70]. Medico-Chirurg. Trans. vol. 1, p. 26.