The survivors have explained the causes of death of their comrades. The faces of these men told the story better than the tongue could describe. The peculiar look of these men was common to them all: the shrunken and pallid features--the rough and blighted skin--the vacant, wild, and unearthly stare of the hollow and lustreless eye,--all told of the results of starvation. This look can no more be described than forgotten, when once seen. Wherever the returned sufferers landed, the bystanders were struck with horror by this fearful appearance. XX. The impure air, the marked and rapid changes of temperature, and the foul water, rendered the tenacity of animal life a simple problem, and when joined to the deprivation of food, it became a matter of surprise that any of the hapless wretches escaped with life. The intense heat served to accelerate the destruction of the organism, already weakened and sapped by the want of food and the putridity of the atmosphere. Life is always best supported at a moderate temperature, which, however, is restricted to a certain degree, depending upon the forces of reserve in the animal; and it is observed by experimentalists that all the vital properties of the nervous centres, the nerves and muscles in adult as well as in young warm-blooded animals, may be much increased by a diminution of temperature. This is shown by Brown-Sequard, in his illustrations of the influences of prolonged muscular exertion on cadaveric rigidity and putrefaction. Some few of the soldiers arriving from the army, with their systems already saturated with paludal and animal poisons, and who were profoundly cachectic, could rally very slowly if at all, under the combined influences of the mephitic miasms and heat of the locality, even had there been no fault in the alimentation. But there was a very great number of the prisoners who were free from disease and debility, as they were direct from their homes in the North, or from the healthy camps of instruction. Scurvy and the vicious forms of zymotic disease, which depend upon starvation and vitiated atmosphere, raged unchecked. The medical care does not seem to have made any impression upon them, because of the limitations of their materia medica, and the want of attention and accommodations for the patients.