In the _Cyclopædia of Practical Medicine_, edited by Sir John Forbes, M.D., and others, 1847, vol. i., pp. 548-9, we find the following:--“Nothing is more certain than death; nothing is more uncertain at times than its reality; and numerous instances are recorded of persons prematurely buried, or actually at the verge of the grave before it was discovered that life still remained; and even of some who were resuscitated by the knife of the anatomist.... Bruhier, a celebrated French physician, who wrote on the uncertainties of the signs of death in 1742, relates an instance of a young woman upon whose supposed corpse an anatomical examination was about to be made when the first stroke of the scalpel revealed the truth; she recovered, and lived many years afterwards. The case related by Philippe Pue is somewhat similar. He proceeded to perform the Cæsarean section upon a woman who had to all appearance died undelivered, when the first incision betrayed the awful fallacy under which he acted.... ‘There is scarcely a dissecting-room that has not some traditional story handed down of subjects restored to life after being deposited within its walls. Many of these are mere inventions to catch the ever greedy ear of curiosity; but some of them are, we fear, too well founded to admit of much doubt. To this class belongs the circumstance related by Louis, the celebrated French writer on medical jurisprudence. A patient who was supposed to have died in the Hospital Salpétrière was removed to his dissecting-room. Next morning Louis was informed that moans had been heard in the theatre; and on proceeding thither he found to his horror that the supposed corpse had revived during the night, and had actually died in the struggle to disengage himself from the winding sheet in which he was enveloped. This was evident from the distorted attitude in which the body was found. Allowing for much of the fiction with which such a subject must ever be mixed, there is still sufficient evidence to warrant a diligent examination of the means of discriminating between real and apparent death; indeed, the horror with which we contemplate a mistake of the living for the dead should excite us to the pursuit of knowledge by which an event so repugnant to our feelings may be avoided.... If life depends upon the presence of a force or power continually opposed to the action of physical and chemical laws, real death will be the loss of this force, and the abandonment of organised bodies to these agents; while apparent death will be only the suspension of the exercise of life, caused by some derangement of the functions which serve as instruments of vital action. This suspension must have been lost for a considerable time, if we may judge by the cases collected by credible authors, to some of which we have alluded, and by the numerous instances of drowned persons restored to life after long submersion. From this definition of life