e days (resulting in
death); and in 1722 there was recorded an instance of abstinence
lasting twenty-five months.

Desbarreaux-Bernard says that Guillaume Granie died in the prison of
Toulouse in 1831, after a voluntary suicidal abstinence of sixty-three
days.

Haller cites a number of examples of long abstinence, but most
extraordinary was that of a girl of Confolens, described by Citois of
Poitiers, who published a history of the case in the beginning of the
seventeenth century. This girl is said to have passed three entire
years, from eleven to fourteen, without taking any kind of aliment. In
the "Harleian Miscellanies" is a copy of a paper humbly offered to the
Royal Society by John Reynolds, containing a discourse upon prodigious
abstinence, occasioned by the twelve months' fasting of a woman named
Martha Taylor, a damsel of Derbyshire. Plot gives a great variety of
curious anecdotes of prolonged abstinence. Ames refers to "the true and
admirable history of the maiden of Confolens," mentioned by Haller. In
the Annual Register, vol. i., is an account of three persons who were
buried five weeks in the snow; and in the same journal, in 1762, is the
history of a girl who is said to have subsisted nearly four years on
water. In 1684 four miners were buried in a coal-pit in Horstel, a half
mile from Liege, Belgium, and lived twenty-four days without food,
eventually making good recoveries. An analysis of the water used during
their confinement showed an almost total absence of organic matter and
only a slight residue of calcium salts.

Joanna Crippen lay six days in the snow without nutriment, being
overcome by the cold while on the way to her house; she recovered
despite her exposure. Somis, physician to the King of Sardinia, gives
an account of three women of Piedmont, Italy, who were saved from the
ruins of a stable where they had been buried by an avalanche of snow,
March 19, 1765. thirty-seven days before. Thirty houses and 22
inhabitants were buried in this catastrophe, and these three women,
together with a child of two, were sheltered in a stable over which the
snow lodged 42 feet deep. They were in a manger 20 inches broad and
upheld by a strong arch. Their enforced position was with their backs
to the wall and their knees to their faces. One woman had 15 chestnuts,
and, fortunately, there were two goats near by, and within reach some
hay, sufficient to feed them for a short time. By milking one of the
goa