There is therefore no reason for doubting the assertions of travelers who tell us that the inhabitants of North America and Russia transport fish that are frozen stiff, and bring them to life again by dipping them into water of ordinary temperature ten or fifteen days afterward. But I think too much reliance should not be put in the process devised by the great English physiologist, Hunter, for prolonging the life of man indefinitely by successive freezings. It has been allowed to no one but a romancer, Mr. Edmond About, to be present at this curious operation.
Among the mammifera we find appearances of death in their winter sleep; but these are incomplete, since the temperature of hibernating animals remains greater by one degree than that of the surrounding air, and the motions of the heart and respiration are simply retarded. Dr. Preyer has observed that a hamster sometimes goes five minutes without breathing appreciably after a fortnight's sleep.
In man himself a suspension of life, or at least phenomena that seem inseparable therefrom, has been observed many times. In the _Journal des Savants_ for 1741 we read that a Col. Russel, having witnessed the death of his wife, whom he tenderly loved, did not wish her buried, and threatened to kill any one who should attempt to remove the body before he witnessed its decomposition himself. Eight days passed by without the woman giving the slightest sign of life, "when, at a moment when he was holding her hand and shedding tears over her, the church bell began to ring, and, to his indescribable surprise, his wife sat up and said, 'It is the last stroke, we shall be too late.' She recovered."
At a session of the Academy of Sciences, Oct. 17, 1864, Mr. Blaudet communicated a report upon a young woman of thirty summers who, being subject to nervous attacks, fell, after her crises, into a sort of lethargic sleep which lasted several weeks and sometimes several months. One of her sleeps, especially, lasted from the beginning of the year 1862 until March, 1863.
Dr. Paul Levasseur relates that, in a certain English family, lethargy seemed to have become hereditary. The first case was exhibited in an old lady who remained for fifteen days in an immovable and insensible state, and who afterward, on regaining her consciousness, lived for quite a long time. Warned by this fact, the family preserved a young man for several weeks who appeared to be dead, but who came to life again.