During its whole progress, Death is making gradual encroachments upon the domain of life. Function after function undergoes impairment, and is less and less perfectly carried on, while organ after organ suffers atrophy and other changes, unfitting it for the performance of offices to which it was originally designed. I will not go over the gloomy detail of the observed modifications occurring in every part of the frame, now a noble ruin, majestic even in decay. The lungs admit and vivify less blood; the heart often diminishes in size and always acts more slowly, and the arteries frequently ossify; nutrition is impeded and assimilation deteriorated; senile marasmus follows, “and the seventh age falls into the lean and slippered pantaloon;” and, last and worst of all, the brain and indeed the whole nervous tissue shrink in size and weight, undergoing at the same time more or less change of structure and composition. As the skull cannot contract on its contents, the shrinking of the brain occasions a great increase of the fluid within the subarachnoid space. Communication with the outer world, now about to be cut off entirely, becomes limited and less intimate. The eyes grow dim; the ear loses its aptitude for harmony, and soon ceases to appreciate sound; odors yield no fragrance; flavors affect not the indifferent palate; and even the touch appreciates only harsh and coarse impressions. The locomotive power is lost; the capillaries refuse to circulate the dark, thick blood; the extremities retain no longer their vital warmth; the breathing slow and oppressed, more and more difficult, at last terminates forever with a deep expiration. This tedious process is rarely accomplished in the manner indicated without interruption; it is usually, nay, as far as my experience has gone, always brought to an abrupt close by the supervention of some positive malady. In our climate, this is, in the larger proportion, an affection of the respiratory apparatus, bronchitis, or pulmonitis. It will, of course, vary with the original or constitutional predisposition of the individual, and somewhat in relation to locality and season. Many aged persons die of apoplexy and its kindred cerebral maladies, not a few of diarrhœa; a winter epidemic of influenza is apt to be fatal to them in large numbers everywhere. When we regard death pathologically, that is, as the result of violence and destructive disease, it is evident that the phenomena presented will vary relatively to the contingencies effective in producing it. It is obviously out of place here to recount them, forming as they do a vast collection of instructive facts, the basis indeed of an almost separate science, Morbid Anatomy.