has sustained severe injury, the electric charge being divided and weakened as it ascended. Any approach to a fire-place should be particularly avoided, for the chimneys are very likely to determine the course of the lightning; the same caution is necessary with respect to gilt furniture, bell-wires, and moderately extensive surfaces of metal of every description. DEATH BY STARVATION. That a living animal body cannot long survive without the ingestion of alimentary matter, is too self-evident to require demonstration. Living bodies, says _Cuvier_, may be considered as a kind of furnaces into which inert substances are successively thrown, which combine among themselves in various manners, maintain a certain place, and perform an action determined by the nature of the combinations they have formed, and at last fly off in order to become again subject to the laws of inanimate nature. It must, however, be observed, that there is a difference, depending on age and health, in the proportion of the parts which enter into the current, and those which abandon it; and that the velocity of the motion usually varies according to the different conditions of each living body; hence it follows, that the period during which an individual may exist without food, will be liable to variation. We have already stated (page 394) that, _cæteris paribus_, he will perish from inanition with a rapidity proportioned to his youth, and state of robust vigour; and we remarked in what strict conformity with physiological principles the poet _Dante_ had described the fate of _Ugolino_ and his family.[58] The same fact appears also to have been well understood by the ancient physicians;[59] equally evident is it that women are able to support abstinence longer than men. It has been also observed that a moist atmosphere contributes to the protraction of life, under circumstances of privation; this may depend, not only upon the fluid matter thus furnished to the body, but upon the non-conducting power of the medium, in relation to aqueous vapour; the ingestion of a very small proportion of water revives in an extraordinary degree, the animal perishing from famine, and prolongs his existence. _Redi_[60] instituted a series of experiments with the sole view of ascertaining how long animals can live without food. Of a number of capons which he kept without either solid or liquid food, not one survived the ninth day; but one to which he allowed water, drank it with avidity, and did not perish until the twentieth day. _Elizabeth Woodcock_, who was buried under the snow, near Cambridge, for the space of eight days, undoubtedly owed her preservation to the snow which she occasionally sucked.[61]