Note 67 — Chapter II

Though both objects are equally essential, the former is usually the more pressing; and it has been ascertained by experiment, what we should expect from theory, that when animals are starved to death, there is a progressive decline in the temperature of their bodies; so that the proximate cause of death by starvation is not weakness, but cold. See Williams's Principles of Medicine, p. 36; and on the connexion between the loss of animal heat and the appearance of rigor mortis in the contractile parts of the body, see Vogel's Pathological Anatomy of the Human Body, p. 532. Compare the important and thoughtful work of Burdach, Physiologie comme Science d'Observation, vol. v. pp. 144, 436, vol. ix. p. 231.