“Although the French Government is anxious to enforce throughout the whole empire the rules carried out in Paris, it is to be feared that great difficulties lie in the way. The verification of deaths on so enormous a scale, with strict minuteness, is almost impracticable. But, even if it were not, many timid persons would say: ‘Who is to assure us of the correctness of the doctor’s observations? Unfortunately, too many terrible examples of their fallibility are on record. The professional man is pressed for time. He pays a passing visit; gives a hurried glance; and a fatal mistake is so easily made!’ Public opinion will not be reassured until you can show, every time a death occurs, an irrefutable demonstration that life has departed. “M. de Parville now announces the possibility of this great desideratum. He professes to place in any one’s hands a self-acting apparatus which would declare not only whether the death be real, but _would leave in the hands of the experimenter a written proof of the reality of the death_. The scheme is this: It is well known that atropine--the active principle of _belladonna_--possesses the property of considerably dilating the pupil of the eye. Oculists constantly make use of it when they want to perform an operation, or to examine the interior of the eye. Now, M. le Docteur Bouchut has shown that atropine has no action on the pupil when death is real. In a state of lethargy, the pupil, under the influence of a few drops of atropine, dilates in the course of a few minutes; the dilatation also takes place a few instants after death; but it ceases absolutely in a quarter of an hour, or half an hour at the very longest; consequently the enlargement of the pupil is a certain sign that death is only apparent. [AN INGENIOUS CONTRIVANCE.] “This premised, imagine a little camera obscura, scarcely so big as an opera-glass, containing a slip of photographic paper, which is kept unrolling for five-and-twenty or thirty minutes by means of clockwork. This apparatus, placed a short distance in front of the dead person’s eye, will depict on the paper the pupil of the eye, which will have been previously moistened with a few drops of atropine. It is evident that, as the paper slides before the eye of the corpse, if the pupil dilate, its photographic image will be dilated; if, on the contrary, it remains unchanged, the image will retain its original size. An inspection of the paper then enables the experimenter to read upon it whether the death is real or apparent only. This sort of declaration can be handed to the civil officer, who will give a permit to bury in return.