one of these three organs, the heart, the lungs, or the brain. Life, they said in their inaccurate language, depends upon these as upon three supports. Hence the idea of the vital tripod. But it is not only this trio of organs which maintain the organism; the kidney and the liver are no less important. In different degrees each part exercises its action on the rest. Life is based in reality on the immense multitude of living cells associated for the formation of the body; on the thirty trillion anatomical elements, each part is more or less necessary to all the rest, according as the bond of solidarity is drawn more or less closely in the organism under consideration.
Death and the Brain.—There are indeed more noble elements charged with higher functions than the rest. These are the nervous elements. Those of the brain preside over the higher functions of animality, sensibility, voluntary movement, and the exercise of the intellect. The rest of the nervous system forms an instrument of centralization which establishes the relations of the parts one with the other and secures their solidarity. When the brain is stricken and its functions cease, man has lost the consciousness of his existence. Life seems to have disappeared. We say of a man in this plight that he no longer lives, thus confusing general life with the cerebral life which is its highest manifestation. But the man or the animal without a brain lives what may be called a vegetative life. The human anencephalic foetus lives for some time, just as the foetus which is properly formed. Observation always shows that this existence of the other parts of the body cannot be sustained indefinitely in the absence of that of the brain. By a series of impulses due to the solidarity of the
