SLEEP AND DEATH.

Rangitikei Advocate and Manawatu Argus, Volume XXXII, Issue 8910, 2 September 1907, Page 1

SLEEP AND DEATH.

The phenomenon called sleep may bo slimmed up in the following propositions, says a writer in the Cosmopolitan :

First: Sleep is temporary death of the functions of the sensitive system, due to exhaustion by fatigue. Secoudly : This death is temporary because the vital system continues to perform its functions during sleep aud restores the sensitive organs to their normal condition.

For our purpose death may bo considered under the three heads — natural death, sudden death, aud deatli frcaa disease. Natural death is death from old age. It differs from natural sleep only in degree. The gradual loss of sensibility by the sensitive organs which precedes sleep now takes place in the vital system, aud all the organs pass into permanent sloop together. There can be no pain preceding or at the moment of such a death, any more than there is pain preceding and a t the moment of passing into temporary sleep. Sudden death may he defined as deatli due to a sudden injury from without or within the body sufficient to destroy at once all irritability of both the sensitive snd vital systems. It requires no arguments to prove that a person who is suddenly stricken dead can suffer no pain. The element of time must he present in order to suffer physical pain, aud in the sudden deatli of a person the element of time is absent.

Wo now come to consider the third aud by far the most frequent form of death, namely, death from disease. As soon as disease is establl: lied dying begins, which is but a more rapid than natural ceasing of all sensibilities, accompanied with more or less suffering, according ‘to the cause which produces it. This dying aud suffering, called disease, must terminate either iu so-called death, which is insensibility to it, or in recovery, which is removal of the cause of it. But in any event, the suffering has boon endured, no matter whether the final termination is death or recovery.

No one is conscious of or cau recall the moment he passes from waking into natural or temporary sleep. Nor shall we, by a “supreme agony” or iu any other way, be conscious of passing into permanent sleep. Being born and dying are the two most important physiological events iu the life history of our bodies, aud wo shall know uo more about the latter event at thcjtime it occurs than we did about the former.