ever since 1861 he has eaten the flesh of all animals that have died within his reach, no matter from what disease. He affirms that one may eat with impunity the flesh, cooked (not putrid), of any of the domesticated animals, no matter what they died of—glanders, typhus, hydrophobia, etc. So far from the flesh of animals which have died naturally having a repugnant appearance or a peculiar flavor, he states that he has placed the two kinds side by side in the same pan and with the same sauce, and, in serving to different persons, many of them connoisseurs, the meat of animals that have died a natural death has invariably been pronounced superior to that from the slaughter-house!
New Test of Death.—The importance of having some readily-applied and indisputable test of the fact of death is apparent, and many are the processes that have been offered to determine it. Nevertheless, such a test appears to be still a desideratum—unless, indeed, we accept that offered by Kappeler. In the course of his researches on the electrical stimulation of dead muscles, Kappeler subjected twenty corpses to the action of various electric currents, noting the times of disappearance of contractility. In persons emaciated by chronic maladies, it disappeared much more rapidly than in well-nourished individuals, or those who had had acute disease. It disappeared seventy-five minutes after death at the quickest, and six and a half hours at the slowest. In cases where a rise of temperature is observed after death electric contractility persists longest. So long as there remains the least flicker of life the contractions continue intact. In the most prolonged faints, in the deepest lethargies, in poisoning by carbonic oxide, chloroform, etc., there is contraction so long as life lasts. But if the muscles make no response to the electrical stimulation, Kappeler pronounces life to be extinct.
Voracity of the Trout.—A correspondent writing from Au Sable Forks, New York, communicates to The Monthly the following very remarkable instance of voracity in a trout: While he and another gentleman were fishing in a stream near the place of his residence, they came to a "long still hole," into which his companion dropped a hook and line, and immediately after pulled up a trout measuring about nine inches. The trout had swallowed the hook, and, in trying to extricate it, the fish's mouth, throat, and stomach, were found to be almost filled with a snake. They pulled the animal out and threw it on the bank; it had evidently been recently killed. "We did not measure the snake," writes our correspondent, "but each of us estimated its length at fourteen inches. We took," he adds, "about a dozen more trout from the same hole, which seemed to show that this enormous meal had not made the trout in the least sluggish, or dulled the edge of his appetite; for if it had, some of the smaller fish would have taken the bait before him."
Deaths from Inhalation of Chloroform.—In communicating to the Cincinnati Academy of Medicine a list of deaths by chloroform occurring in that city and its vicinity, Dr. Charles Anderson recognizes a "strange fatality" attending the use of the drug in Cincinnati. No other city in the United States numbers so many deaths from this cause; yet, perhaps, if all the chloroform casualties of other cities had been duly recorded, Cincinnati would no longer hold this bad preëminence. The author calls attention to a singular anomaly observed in the action of this anæsthetic, viz., that many of those who have died from chloroform have taken it repeatedly, and often for a considerable lime, without any unpleasant symptoms, whereas an attempt to give it a short time afterward has proved fatal. Thus one patient, who had taken it frequently during ten years, died from forty drops; another had taken it a hundred times, and had once been under its influence for five hours; the last dose, which was fatal, consisted of an inhalation or two from a chloroformed handkerchief. After citing other similar instances, Dr. Anderson, whose communication we find in the Clinic, expresses the opinion that in these cases there exists a sort of floating idiosyncrasy—one that may have hold of a man for an hour or an instant. "It may be on him to-day," adds the author, "and off to-morrow; but if, while under its influence, he inhale the vapor of
