“It is important to state that man, in the same way as animals, dies from cutaneous asphyxia when his body is covered by impermeable applications. I shall detail, in another work, the results of my researches upon this subject, and facts which still belong to general history will enter into the province of medicine. Thus, at Florence, when Leo X. was raised to the pontificate, a child was gilt all over, in order to represent the golden age. This unfortunate child soon died, the victim of a physiological experiment of a novel kind. I have gilded, silvered, and tinned several guinea-pigs, and all have died like the child at Florence.” Monsieur Fourcault, in summing up his researches, remarks as follows:— “Nasal catarrh, diarrhœa, paralysis, marasmus, convulsive movements, and finally the phenomena of asphyxia are also the results of the same experiments. Cutaneous asphyxia may cause the death of man and animals; in this affection, the blood presents, in the highest degree, the refrigerant and stupefying qualities of VEINOUS [9] blood.” The above extracts are our answer to those superficial medical objectors, who would argue that death is not occasioned, in the above instances, by the exclusion of atmospheric air from the system, but by the suppression of poisonous salts secreted in the skin. The effects of the suppression of the most poisonous and irritating of these is well known to the physician, but their phenomena bear no analogy to those presented in the case before us, which exhibits all the symptoms and appearance of true suffocation. If, however, the evidence of these experiments be not sufficient to convince them, that a deficient supply of air, producing suffocating symptoms, was the real cause of death in the above cases, we will be prepared to meet them on a more convenient battle-field, where arguments, which would only prove tedious and unintelligible to the non-professional reader, may be freely adduced in support of our position. Were it not tedious to multiply instances, many more might be adduced, such as the dangerous stage of small-pox being contemporaneous with the breaking of the pustules, when the surface of the body becomes partially varnished over, and the fact that a scald or burn is dangerous, not in proportion to its depth, but breadth.