importance.

I then questioned my cousin and the other students present in regard to
the symptomatics of death, and I saw with surprise that, not only had
the expression of this phenomenon escaped them hitherto, but that they
had no exact and precise knowledge concerning this grave and important
question.

There remained, in order to complete my discovery and to deduce useful
results from it, to verify the symptom on the dying man. It was
important for me to know in what degree it might become manifest on the
approach of death.

My wishes were gratified as if by magic, for I was led from the school
of anatomy to that of clinical medicine. There a house-student, a friend
of my cousin, placed me beside a dying patient, and I examined with the
utmost attention the hands of the unhappy man struggling against the
clutches of inevitable death.

At first I observed something strange in regard to myself, namely that
the emotion which such a sight would have caused me under any other
circumstances, was absolutely null at this moment; close attention
dulled all feeling in me. I then understood the courage which may
inspire the surgeon in the discharge of his duty; and I drew from this
observation deductions of great artistic interest.

Now I proved that the thumbs of the dying man contracted at first in
almost imperceptible degree; but as the last struggle drew near, and in
the supreme efforts made by the patient to hold fast to the life which
was slipping from him, I saw all his fingers convulsively directed
toward the palm of the hand, thus hiding the thumbs which had previously
approached that centre of convergence. Death speedily followed this
crisis and soon restored to the fingers a more normal position; but the
contraction of the thumb persistently conformed to my previous
observations. The presence and progress of this phenomenon in the dying
was invariably confirmed by numerous tests which I afterward tried.

Thus, I had acquired the proof that, not only does the total adduction
of the thumb characterize death, but that this phenomenon indicates the
approach of death in proportion to its intensity. I, therefore,
possessed the fundamental principle of a system of semeiotics hitherto
unknown to physiologists; but this principle, already so full of
interest, must be made profitable to art.

A multitude of pictures, which in former times I had admired at the
museum, passed before my mind's eye. I recalled battle-sce