We have sometimes examples of partial death, analogous to this sort of general death. Thus, when the circulation is impeded in a limb, and the red blood no longer distributed to its parts, such parts become at first insensible and paralytic, then gangrenous. The operation of aneurism furnishes us with too many instances of this phenomenon, which by ligature, may be produced also in the living animal. Undoubtedly the principal cause of death in these cases, is the want of that stimulus which it is the business of the particles of the red blood to create, in contradistinction to those of the black blood, but the absence of the intestine movement in question, is by no means a less real cause of such death. As for the interruption of the nutritive process, it cannot be admitted as a cause of the symptoms which succeed after the obliteration of a large artery. The slow, the gradual, and insensible way, in which this function is performed, does not accord with the sudden and instantaneous production of those symptoms, especially as they affect the animal life; for this is annihilated in the limb at the very instant when the blood ceases to flow into it, just in the same way as it is, when by the section of its nerves, the influence of the brain is abstracted.[71] Besides the preceding causes, which, when the heart is dead, suspend in general the whole of the animal and organic functions; there is another cause of death which especially affects the greater number of the latter, such as the processes of nutrition, exhalation, secretion, and therefore digestion, which is only performed by means of the secreted fluid. This cause of death to which I refer, consists in the necessary stop which is put to these different functions, in consequence of their no longer receiving the materials upon which they are exercised. Nevertheless, such term arrives by degrees only, because they receive the materials on which they act, from the capillary, and not from the general circulation. Now the capillary circulation, is only subject to the influence of the insensible contractile powers of the parts in which it is performed; and is exercised independently of the heart, as may be seen in the greater number of reptiles, where the heart may be taken away, and the blood be notwithstanding observed to oscillate for a long time afterwards in the minuter vessels.[72] It is manifest, then, that whatever quantity of blood is left in the capillary system at the period of the death of the heart, will for some time afterwards be sufficient to keep up the functions in question, and that such functions in consequence will only gradually cease. The following is a general view of the manner in which the annihilation of all the functions succeeds to the interruption of those of the heart.