At the Homo factus est of the Credo, the fathers prostrate themselves on the ground, and the mode of celebrating mass is strange, and differs in many points from the ordinary mass of seculars. As the blessed sacrament was not reserved in the chapel, we preferred finishing our thanksgiving beneath the blue sky on the skirts of the forest of pines. After breakfast we tasted the celebrated liqueur made by the monks from the wild mountain flowers. It was very good; there was a certain charm in taking it on the spot where it was made. We had a talk with the reverend mother, and left with her a long list of intentions to be given to the fathers, asking especially their prayers for the conversion of England. This, we were thankful to hear, was frequently an object of their devotions. Before leaving, our curiosity to see some of the fathers was gratified; for two came out to give instructions to some workmen. We began to descend the mountain at about half-past eight, arrived at St. Laurent du Pont about ten, and as soon as our carriage of the previous day was ready started for Grenoble. Once the horse came to a dead stop, and we fancied the driver wished to prolong our journey as long as he could, that we might have no time for making the threatened complaints on reaching Grenoble. As it was, we arrived there five minutes before the time fixed for our departure at half past-one. There was hardly a minute to get anything to eat beyond some fruit and bread which we took with us. So the driver escaped his punishment, after all.
From The Reader.
DEATH BY LIGHTNING.
People in general imagine, if they think at all about the matter, that an impression upon the nerves—a blow, for example, or the prick of a pin—is felt the moment it is inflicted. But this is not the case. The nerves are not the repositories of sensation; they are but the conductors of the motion which produces sensation. The seat of sensation is the brain, and to it the intelligence of any injury done to the nerves has to be transmitted, before that injury becomes manifest in consciousness. The transmission, moreover, requires time, and the consequence is, that a wound inflicted at a portion of the body distant from the brain is more tardily appreciated than one inflicted adjacent to the brain. By an extremely ingenious experimental arrangement, Helmholtz has determined the velocity of nervous transmission both in warm-blooded and cold-blooded animals. In a frog, he found the velocity to be about eighty feet a second, or less than one-thirteenth of the velocity of sound in air. If this holds good, which it probably does, in the case of a whale, then a creature of this class, eighty feet long, if wounded in the tail, would not, as Helmholtz has remarked, be conscious of the injury till a second after the wound had been inflicted. But this is not the only ingredient in the delay that occurs between the impression on [{834}] the nerves and the consciousness of the impression. There can scarcely be a doubt that to every act of consciousness belongs a determinate molecular arrangement of the brain—that every thought or feeling has its physical correlative in that organ; and nothing can be more certain than that every physical change, whether molecular or mechanical, requires time for its accomplishment. So that, even after the intelligence of an impression, made upon a distant portion of the body, has reached the brain, a still further time is necessary for the brain itself to put its house in order—for its molecules to take up the position necessary to the completion of consciousness. Helmholtz considers one-tenth of a second necessary for this purpose. Thus, in the case of the whale above supposed, we have first one second consumed in the transmission of intelligence through the sensor nerves from the tail to the head; one-tenth of a second is required by the brain to become conscious of the intelligence it has received; and, if the velocity of transmission through the motor be the same as that through the sensor nerves, a second would be consumed in sending a command to the tail to defend itself. Thus more than two seconds would elapse before an impression made upon its caudal nerves could be responded to by a whale eighty feet long.
Now, it is quite conceivable that an injury might be inflicted which would render the nerves unfit to be the conductors of the motion which results in sensation; and if such a thing occurred, no matter how severe the injury might be, we should not be conscious of it. Or it may be, that long before the time required for the brain itself to complete the arrangement necessary for the act of consciousness, its power of arrangement might be wholly suspended. In such case also, though the injury might be of such a nature as to cause death, this would occur not only without pain, but absolutely without feeling of any kind.
Death, in this case, would be simply the sudden negation of life, accomplished without any intervention of consciousness. Doubtless, there are many kinds of death of this character. The passage of a musket bullet through the brain is a case in point; and the placid aspect of a man thus killed is in perfect accordance with the conclusion which might be drawn à priori from the experiments of Helmholtz. Cases of insensibility, moreover, are not uncommon, which do not result in death, and after which the person affected has been able to testify that no pain was felt prior to the loss of consciousness.
The time required for a rifle-bullet to pass clean through a man's head may be roughly estimated at one-thousandth of a second. Here, therefore, we should have no room for sensation, and death would be painless. But there are other actions which far transcend in rapidity that of the rifle-bullet. A flash of lightning cleaves a cloud, appearing and disappearing in less than one-hundred-thousandth of a second, and the velocity of electricity is such as would carry it over a distance equal to that which separates the earth and moon in a single second. It is well known that a luminous impression once made upon the retina endures for about one-sixth of a second, and that this is the reason why we see a ribbon of light when a glowing coal is caused to pass rapidly through the air. A body illuminated by an instantaneous flash continues to be seen for the sixth of a second after the flash has become extinct; and if the body thus illuminated be in motion, it appears at rest at the place which it occupied when the flash fell upon it. The color-top is familiar to most of us. By this instrument a disk with differently colored sectors is caused to rotate rapidly; the colors blend together, and if they are chosen in the proportions necessary to form white light, the disk appears white when the motion is sufficiently rapid. Such a top, rotating [{835}] in a dark room, and illuminated by an electric spark, appears motionless, each distinct color being clearly seen. Professor Dove has found that a flash of lightning produces the same effect. During a thunder-storm he put a color-top in exceedingly rapid motion, and found that every flash revealed the top as a motionless object with colors distinct. If illuminated solely by a flash of lightning, the motion of all bodies on the earth's surface would, as Dove has remarked, appear suspended. A cannon-ball, for example, would have its flight apparently arrested, and would seem to hang motionless in space as long as the luminous impression which revealed the ball remained upon the eye.
If, then, a rifle-bullet move with sufficient rapidity to destroy life without the interposition of sensation, much more is a flash of lightning competent to produce this effect. Accordingly, we have well authenticated cases of people being struck senseless by lightning who, on recovery, had no memory of pain. The following circumstantial case is described by Hemmer: On the 30th of June, 1788, a soldier in the neighborhood of Manheim, being overtaken by rain, placed himself under a tree, beneath which a woman had previously taken shelter. He looked upward to see whether the branches were thick enough to afford the required protection, and, in doing so, was struck by lightning, and fell senseless to the earth. The woman at his side experienced the shock in her foot, but was not struck down. Some hours afterward the man revived, but knew nothing about what had occurred, save the fact of his looking up at the branches. This was his last act of consciousness, and he passed from the conscious to the unconscious condition without pain. The visible marks of a lightning stroke are usually insignificant: the hair is sometimes burnt; slight wounds are observed; while, in some instances, a red streak marks the track of the discharge over the skin.
The effects of a shock of artificial lightning on a gentleman of our acquaintance, who is very sensitive to the electric discharge, may be here described. Under ordinary circumstances the discharge from a small Leyden jar is exceedingly unpleasant to him. Some time ago he happened to stand in the presence of a numerous audience, with a battery of fifteen large Leyden jars charged beside him. Through some awkwardness on his part, he touched a wire which he had no right to touch, and the discharge of the battery went through his body. Here life was absolutely blotted out for a very sensible interval, without a trace of pain. In a second or two consciousness returned; the recipient of the shock saw himself in the presence of his audience and apparatus, and by the help of these external facts immediately concluded that he had received the battery discharge. His intellectual consciousness of his position was restored with exceeding rapidity, but not so his optical consciousness. To prevent the audience from being alarmed, he observed that it had often been his desire to receive accidentally such a shock, and that his wish had at length been fulfilled. But while making this remark, the appearance which his body presented to him was that of a number of separate pieces. The arms, for example, were detached from the trunk, and seemed suspended in the air. In fact, memory, and the power of reasoning, appeared to be complete long before the optic nerve was restored to healthy action. But what we wish chiefly to dwell upon here is, the absolute painlessness of the shock; and there cannot be a doubt, to a person struck dead by lightning, the passage from life to death occurs without consciousness being in the least degree implicated. It is an abrupt stoppage of sensation, unaccompanied by a pang.