I have said that, in physiological death, the natural decay of advancing age, there is a gradual encroachment of death upon life; so here, in premature death from violent diseases, the contrasted analogy is offered of life maintaining its ground far amidst the destructive changes of death. Thus, in cholera asphyxia, the body, for an indefinite period after all other signs of life have ceased, is agitated by horrid spasms, and violently contorted. We learn from Dr. Dowler that it is not only in these frightful manifestations, and in the cold stiffness of the familiar _rigor mortis_, that we are to trace this tenacious muscular contraction as the last vital sign, but that in all, or almost all cases we shall find it lingering, not in the heart, anciently considered in its right ventricle the _ultimum moriens_, nor in any other internal fibres, but in the muscles of the limbs, the biceps most obstinately. This muscle will contract, even after the arm with the scapula has been torn from the trunk, upon receiving a sharp blow, so as to raise the forearm from the table, to a right angle with the upper arm. We also learn from him the curious fact that the generation of animal heat, which physiologists have chosen to point out as a function most purely vital, does not cease upon the supervention of obvious or apparent death. There is, he tells us, a steady development for some time of what he terms “post-mortem caloricity,” by which the heat is carried not only above the natural or normal standard, but to a height rarely equalled in the most sthenic or inflammatory forms of disease. He has seen it reach 113° of Fahr., higher than Hunter ever met with it, in his experiments made for the purpose of exciting it; higher than it has been noted even in scarlatina, 112°, I think, being the ultimate limit observed in that disease of pungent external heat; and far beyond the natural heat of the central parts of the healthy body, which is 97° or 98°. Nor is it near the centre, or at the trunk, that the post-mortem warmth is greatest, but, for some unknown reason, at the inner part of the thigh, about the lower margin of its upper third. I scarcely know any fact in nature more incomprehensible or inexplicable than this. We were surprised when it was first told us that, in the Asiatic pestilence, the body of the livid victim was often colder before than after death; but this, I think, is easily understood. The profluvia of cholera, and its profound capillary stagnation, concur in carrying off all the heat generated, and in preventing or impeding the development of animal heat. No vital actions, no changes necessary to the production of caloric, can proceed without the minute circulation which has been checked by the asphyxiated condition of the subject, while the fluids leave the body through every outlet, and evaporation chills the whole exposed and relaxed surface. Yet the lingering influence of a scarcely