“Patients labouring under an intense and prolonged paroxysm of catalepsy have been supposed to be dead, and have been interred alive. [VARIOUS OTHER TESTS.] “There are numerous cases of this kind on record, and many more where individuals, after being laid in their coffins, have fortunately recovered from the attack before the period of interment. In such cases respiration is insensible, and the heart’s action is almost in abeyance; the surface of the body is nearly cold, and presents the pallor of death; and the articulations are stiff. Although it is no doubt a difficult task to distinguish this state of trance from the state of death, yet a careful examination of the body, and time, would lead to a correct diagnosis. The limbs after death are first lax, then stiff, and ultimately lax again. The stiffness of the limbs, known as the cadaveric rigidity, or _rigor mortis_, lasts for a longer or shorter time, according to circumstances; the sooner it supervenes, the shorter is its duration, and conversely. Now the stiffness of the limbs accompanying this intense form of trance supervenes at once, and lasts as long as the paroxysm continues. This is consequently a valuable diagnostic sign.” It may be observed that only in rare and very exceptional cases is time allowed for careful and accurate diagnosis. CADAVEROUS COUNTENANCE. Anthony Fothergill, in “A New Inquiry,” 1795, p. 92:-- “Nor can even the cadaverous countenance be, separately considered, an infallible test of life’s total extinction. Nay, even putrefaction itself, though allowed to be the most unequivocal sign of death, might chance to deceive us in that syncope which sometimes supervenes on the last stage of the confluent small-pox, sea-scurvy, or other highly putrid diseases.” REGARDING CLENCHED JAWS. A. de Labordette, Chirurgien de l’Hôpital de Lisieux, states in a letter to the Secretary of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution:-- “I have collected manifold observations relating to persons drowned or asphyxiated, in whose case contraction of the jaws was remarked, and who were subsequently restored to life,” Dr. Brown-Séquard concurred in this, and declared further that such contraction is rather a sign of life than of death.--_Lancet, 1870, vol. i., p. 436._ THE DIAPHANOUS TEST, for the discovery of which a prize was given by the French Academy of Medicine, is regarded by Sir B. Ward Richardson as of secondary importance. It has certainly failed in many instances. The following communication on THE PROPER VALUE OF THE DIAPHANOUS TEST OF DEATH, by Edwin Haward, M.D.Edin., F.R.C.S.Eng., appears in the _Lancet_ of June 10, 1893, p. 1404:-- [THE DIAPHANOUS TEST.]