The observations which follow have been made by persons accustomed to observe the dying. But deaths occasioned by maladies which destroy consciousness, or reason, or speech, must not be included in these observations. In order to judge of the thoughts which occupy the dying we must consider those who preserve the integrity of their intellectual faculties until their latest breath. They always die calmly. Consumptive patients, the wounded, those who die from an affection of the stomach or of the intestinal tube, of those slow fevers which consume the strength without impairing the intellectual faculties, these generally remain in the full possession of their intelligence to the last, and die with great tranquillity, even satisfaction. In almost all these cases death is preceded by a gradual decline of strength and sensation, so that the individual has hardly any consciousness of the change he is about to undergo, and looks forward to the moment of death with perfect indifference. There is a period, which frequently lasts for several hours, during which, life having completely left the body, it is already a corpse which is under the eyes of the spectators, and yet that corpse still moves and speaks. But the soul which survives in the body, really dead, is not the soul of the terrestrial man, but of the superhuman being. The dying person has the consciousness, and perhaps even the prevision of the ineffable happiness which awaits him in that new world upon whose threshold he is standing, and he expresses his happiness by his words and looks. In a sigh of supreme joy he exhales his last breath. This extraordinary state, in which the dying are partly on earth, and partly in the new world to which they are destined, explains the touching eloquence, the sublime words which sometimes come from their feeble lips. An uneducated poor man will express himself upon his death-bed with eloquence incomprehensible to those who are listening to him. It also explains the prophecies, justified by subsequent events, which have been uttered by the dying. They have a knowledge of things of which, in their ordinary condition as belonging to the human species, they could not possibly have had any notion. Therefore, we ought to treasure up their last words with pious care, and scrupulously fulfil the wishes which they express. In Moldavia, when a peasant has escaped death in a severe illness, after having been on the brink of the grave, his friends press around his bed to ask him what he had seen in the other world, and what news he has for them from their dead relatives. Then the poor invalid interprets his visions for them as well as he can. A modern writer, who has left some small books on spiritualist philosophy, M. Constant Savy, relates in his "_Pensées et Méditations_," an extraordinary dream which he had when he was, apparently, at the point of death. We transcribe this curious and interesting document from M. Pezzani's work:--