3dly. That it is the inequality of such influence, which occasions the difference in the cessation of the two lives in the case of asphyxia. The animal life is always annihilated before the organic life. We may conceive from what has been said in this and the preceding chapter, how unfounded are the suspicions of those who have supposed that the brain, after the separation of the head from the body by the guillotine, might live awhile and have sensation. The action of this organ is immediately connected with its double excitements.--1st, By motion; 2dly, By the nature of the blood which it receives. Now, when the interruption of such excitement is sudden, the interruption of every kind of feeling must also be sudden. When the chemical functions of the lungs are suspended, the disturbance induced in the functions of the brain, has indeed a very considerable influence on the death of the other organs; nevertheless, such disturbance is the beginning of death only in the animal life, and even then is connected with other causes. The organic life ceases from the sole presence of the black blood among the different organs. The death of the brain is only an isolated and partial phenomenon of asphyxia, which does not take place in any particular organ, but in all alike. We shall explain this assertion in the following chapter. FOOTNOTES: [91] In a preceding article, Bichat maintains that the entrance of the arterial blood contributes to support the action of the brain, principally by the jar which it communicates to this organ. It is astonishing, after this, that he should attribute the suspension of the cerebral functions to the interruption of the chemical phenomena of respiration rather than to that of the mechanical phenomena. He could not however be ignorant, that it is to the last that must be referred the greatest of the two motions with which the brain is constantly agitated. These motions of the brain in relation with those of respiration have been for a long time observed. Schitling has described them in a memoir inserted in the first volume of the Memoirs of Learned Foreigners. He has shown that the brain rises in expiration, and flattens in inspiration. Haller, Lamure and Lorry have since him investigated this motion, and they have given an explanation of it, which is defective only because they have been ignorant of the influence of respiration on the acceleration of the course of the blood in the arteries through the medium of the capillary vessels.