when it comes quickly and without previous announcement; so the confessions of some persons who have escaped the gravest dangers would make us believe. Mr. Wallace has recorded some incidents of this kind in his Darwinism, and says of them that those persons who have escaped from the clutches of a lion or a tiger experienced no physical or moral suffering in their peril. Dr. Livingstone describes his feeling when seized and shaken by a lion as a kind of stupor with no pain or terror, although he was fully conscious of what had happened to him; so a chloroformed subject is able to follow the operation without feeling the instrument. Mr. Whyrnper, when he fell several hundred feet on the Matterhorn, rolling from rock to rock till he alighted on a mass of snow which fortunately held him just clear of the edge of a precipice, although he received a number of contusions, felt no pain and did not lose consciousness, but simply speculated as to the number of tumbles he would still receive before it would be over with.
The questions arise whether the nervous shock occasioned by the accident produces a kind of insensibility which paralyzes, as it were, the feelings of fear and terror, or whether the affair goes on so rapidly that there is no time for the formation of all the complex of images and feelings that culminate in the fear of death. Livingstone's precise observation suggests that there is really a kind of acquired insensibility. His comparison of his condition to that of a subject under the influence of chloroform appears more than probable when we reflect that severe nervous shocks of every kind coming under the form of extremely violent and sudden sensations or emotions produce this sort of hypnotic anæsthesia. It is well known, for example, that if we fall and receive a rude shock we remain for some time unconscious, or at least with a diminished sensibility. The same effect is produced by a sudden affliction, as, for example, a surprise of very bad news; grief does not follow at once, but a kind of insensible stupor with only the most obtuse consciousness of pain and of self. Thus the nervous shock provoked by the tumble over the rocks or by lying helpless under the paw of a wild beast would produce a kind of semi-sensibility, in which the thought of death would present itself just like any other thought without exciting any fear or terror.
Another extremely interesting problem in psychology lies in the study of the thoughts and feelings of the sick with respect to death. Are they preoccupied in the course of their illness with this probable ending? Do they preserve the habitual carelessness of all mankind? What relation exists between the moral character of the patient, between the kind of disease, and the fear of death? I can not fully answer these questions for want of a suffi-
