Even when the most stirring events are transpiring, some of the participants may fall asleep. Sentinels on posts of great danger cannot always resist the influence. To punish a man with death, therefore, for yielding to an inexorable law of his being, is not the least of the barbarous customs which are still in force in civilized armies. During the battle of the Nile many of the boys engaged in handing ammunition fell asleep, notwithstanding the noise and confusion of the action and the fear of punishment. And it is said that on the retreat to Corunna whole battalions of infantry slept while in rapid march. Even the most acute bodily sufferings are not always sufficient to prevent sleep. I have seen individuals who had been exposed to great fatigue, and who had while enduring it met with accidents requiring surgical interference, sleep through the pain caused by the knife. Damiens, who attempted the assassination of Louis XV. of France, and who was sentenced to be torn to pieces by four horses, was for an hour and a half before his execution subjected to the most infamous tortures, with red-hot pincers, melted lead, burning sulphur, boiling oil, and other diabolical contrivances, yet he slept on the rack, and it was only by continually changing the mode of torture, so as to give a new sensation, that he was kept awake. He complained, just before his death, that the deprivation of sleep was the greatest of all his torments. Dr. Forbes Winslow[3] quotes from the _Louisville Semi-Monthly Medical News_ the following case: “A Chinese merchant had been convicted of murdering his wife, and was sentenced to die by being deprived of sleep. This painful mode of death was carried into effect under the following circumstances: The condemned was placed in prison under the care of three of the police guard, who relieved each other every alternate hour, and who prevented the prisoner falling asleep night or day. He thus lived nineteen days without enjoying any sleep. At the commencement of the eighth day his sufferings were so intense that he implored the authorities to grant him the blessed opportunity of being strangled, guillotined, burned to death, drowned, garroted, shot, quartered, blown up with gunpowder, or put to death in any conceivable way their humanity or ferocity could invent. This will give a slight idea of the horrors of death from want of sleep.” In infants the necessity for sleep is much greater than in adults, and still more so than in old persons. In the former the formative processes are much more active than those concerned in disintegration. Hence the greater necessity for frequent periods of repose. In old persons, on the contrary, decay predominates over construction, there is a decreased activity of the brain, the nervous system, and of all other organs, and thus the demand for rest and recuperation is lessened.