“By this simple method a hasty or careless certificate of death becomes impossible. The instrument applies the test, and counts the minutes. The doctor and the civil officer are relieved from further responsibility. The paper gives evidence that the verification has actually and carefully been made; for suppose that half an hour is required to produce a test that can be relied on, the length of the strip of paper unrolled marks the time during which the experiment has been continued. An apparatus of the kind might be placed in the hands of the minister or one of the notables of every parish. Such a system would silence the apprehensions of the most timid; fears--natural enough--would disappear, and the world would be shocked by no fresh cases of premature burial.” The authors have not heard whether this ingenious contrivance had been put into practice, or with what result. Various prizes have been offered, and awards made, by scientific and medical societies, but, with one exception, the so-called proofs of death for which the awards have been given are deemed unsatisfactory. The most notable of the prizes is that of the Marquis d’Ourches, who by his will bequeathed the sum of twenty thousand francs to be given to the author of the discovery of a simple and common means of recognising beyond doubt the absolute signs of death, by such a test as could be adopted by poor villagers without technical instruction. The Marquis d’Ourches left also a prize of five thousand francs for a similar discovery, but requiring the intervention of an expert. M. Pierre Manni, Professor at the University of Rome, offered a prize, which was awarded to Dr. E. Bouchut, in 1846. And M. Dusgate, by will, dated January 11, 1872, bequeathed to the French Academy of Sciences a sufficient sum in French _Rentes_, to found a quinquennial prize of two thousand five hundred francs to the author of the best work on the diagnostic signs of death, and the means of preventing premature interments. A decree of November 27, 1874, authorised the Academy to accept this legacy. Dr. Gowers, on “Diseases of the Nervous System,” vol. ii., p. 1037, says:--“In cases of ‘death-trance,’ in which no sign of vitality can be recognised, the presence of life may be ascertained (1) by the absence of any sign of decomposition; (2) by the normal appearance of the _fundus oculi_ as seen with the ophthalmoscope; (3) by the persistence of the excitability of the muscles to electricity. This excitability disappears in three hours after actual death. In a case observed by Rosenthal, thirty hours after supposed death, the muscles were still excitable, and the patient awoke.”