For an extraordinary case on this statute, and much learning on the subject, see the trial of _William Chetwynd_ for the murder of _Thomas Rickets_. 18 _How St. Tri. p._ 290. Footnote 2: Od. Lib. v. lin. 757. Footnote 3: Tractat. de Peste Lib. iv. Hist. 85. Footnote 4: In returning, the ship was cast away on the island of Zante, when this unfortunate philosopher perished from hunger. Footnote 5: _Bruhier, John_, a physician at Paris, in the middle of the seventeenth century; he was author of many works, but his principal celebrity rested on his warnings against burying persons, supposed to be dead, too early. “Dissertation sur l’Incertitude des signes de la Mort et l’abus des enterremens, et embaumemens precipites.” Paris, 1742. He was at the pains of collecting histories of persons who had revived after being supposed to be dead, some of whom had been buried. Bodies ought not to be interred, he says, until putrefaction has commenced. “Memoire sur la necessité d’un Reglement general au sujet des enterremens.” 1745. No one should be buried until the fourth day from their dying. “Addition aux Memoires,” &c. in which he adds to the number of examples of persons who had been buried alive, or had revived after being interred. These works have passed through numerous editions, and have been translated into several other European languages. Footnote 6: Horrible as it may appear, it was a custom in Persia, at the time that _Herodotus_ wrote, of _burying alive_; and this historian was informed that _Amestris_, the wife of _Xerxes_, when she was far advanced in age, commanded fourteen Persian children of illustrious birth to be interred alive, in honour of the Deity whom they supposed to exist under the earth.—_Polyhymnia_, c. xiv. Footnote 7: “A Dissertation on the _Disorder of Death_, or that state of the frame under the signs of Death, called Suspended Animation,” by the Rev. _Walter Whiter_, Rector of Hardingham. Norwich, 1819. 8vo. Footnote 8: _Plin._ Nat. Hist. Lib. vii, c. 52; see also _Valer. Maxim._ Lib. 1, c. 8. For extraordinary histories of persons roused from the tomb, see _Diemerbroeck_, Lib, ii; _Joannes Mathæus_, Quæst. Med.; _Hildanus_ Cent. 2. Obs. 95, 96; _Phillip Salmuth_ Cent. 2, Obs. 86, 87, 95. _Maximilian Misson_ relates in his voyages many curious cases of this kind. “_Nouveau_ Voyage d’Italie.” But the works of _Bruhier_, before mentioned, contain the greatest collection of such anecdotes. Footnote 9: Thus in the Greek, the most philosophically constructed language with which we are acquainted, the _alpha_ and _omega_, the first and last acts of life, are conveyed in the verb αω _spiro_ compounded of those letters. In Latin we also find _spiro_ and _spiritus_. Footnote 10: Lettres sur la certitude des signes de la mort. Footnote 11: Recherches Physiologiques sur la Vie et la Mort. Footnote 12: Phil. Trans. 1811.