_M. Bruhier_[5] also relates a case on the authority of _M. l’Abbé Menon_, of a young woman who was restored by the first incision of the anatomist’s scalpel, and lived many years afterwards. With respect to the instance of _Vesalius_ we would make this general observation, which will probably apply to most of the cases on record; that the movements which have been observed on such occasions are not to be received as demonstrations of life, they merely arise from a degree of muscular irritability which often lingers for many hours after dissolution, and which, on its apparent cessation, may be even re-excited by the application of galvanic stimuli. But there is a propensity in the human mind to believe in these horrors, because between credulity and fear there is an inherent affinity and alliance; and it may be very safely asserted, that there is nothing of which we have a greater instinctive horror,[6] than of any force by which our voluntary exertions are totally repressed; hence it is, as _Cuvier_ has remarked, that the poetic fictions best calculated to insure our sympathy, are those which represent sentient beings inclosed within immoveable bodies; the sighs of Clorinda issuing, with her blood, from the trunk of the cypress, as related in the fable of Tasso, would arrest the fury of the most savage mortal; and the sufferings which attended the confinement of Ariel, by the witch _Sycorax_, within the rift of a cloven pine, are described by Prospero as being of so pitiable a description as to move the sympathy of the very beasts of the forest. --------“She did confine thee, By help of her more potent ministers, And in her most unmitigable rage, Into a cloven pine; within which rift Imprison’d, thou didst painfully remain A dozen years.” --------------“Thou best knows’t What torment I did find thee in: thy groans Did make wolves howl, and penetrate the breasts Of ever-angry bears; it was a torment To lay upon the damn’d.” _Tempest_, _Act_ i, _s._ 2.