A French nobleman, François de Civille, in the time of Karl IX, appended to his monument the inscription: “Thrice dead, thrice buried, and by the grace of God, thrice revived.” The riddle meant that he woke first from his mother’s body at birth and twice in war was thought dead and placed among the dead. But the absence of personal consciousness is very unreliable because after long periods of lethargy many have rather suddenly revived. There never was a doctor present at an exhumation of a living man. Being buried alive is really a ghost that has no justification in civilized lands. This has nothing to do, of course, with simulation. Karl V simulated death in order to enjoy the spectacle of his funeral, as Juliet allowed herself to be buried. By contraction of the muscles of the neck and deep respiration the heart can be checked and the physiologist, Weber, nearly lost his life thus. Dr. Gosch tells of a Colonel Townsend who in the presence of Prof. Cheyne stopped his heart and breathing, the latter tested by a mirror, for half an hour until they were all convinced he was dead. But then he gradually came to, though he died eight hours later. Herter and Rovighi tested lactic acid and its effects on fermentation of the large intestine and found negative results, so that we do not have an arcanum against death or old age in this sense, although insufficient excretion of toxins has much to do with it. In his illuminating articles Professor Raymond Pearl, after showing the novelty of natural death and how even somatic cells now seem possibly immortal if separated from the metazoan body and that heredity is a prime determinant of the length of the span of life, says we must know more of the vagaries of germ plasm before society should assume to control it, although such control sooner or later will be necessary. The death rates for the four diseases that public health and sanitary activities have been most successful in treating, namely, (1) tuberculosis of the lungs, (2) typhoid fever, (3) diphtheria and croup, (4) dysentery, have been materially reduced in the last nineteen years. But if we compare four other causes of death, (1) bronchitis, (2) paralysis, (3) purulent infection and septicemia, (4) softening of the brain, on which health and sanitation have had little effect, it is found that the rate of mortality from these troubles has declined just as much, and probably a little more, in the same period of time, although the numbers in the latter group are far less. “Hence the declining death rate in and of itself does not mark the successful result of human effort.”