Ceredo advance. [volume] (Ceredo, W. Va.) 1885-1939, 1911-10-18

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>~ HE mystery OF life, VIII
science ever solve that rid
w. die? VIII 1t heed The
~ ~ Sphinx" in Emerson's fam
WkM GUS poem who babe the
SSEY eager questioner behold
S himself. the answer and
the question, too? Incred-
1ble as it may seem. scientists are
even now doing that very thing. In
the near future you and | should be
prepared to hear them announce most
!earnedly and sententiously the re-
discovery OF the human soul
Here and there, in hospital labora-
tories widely scattered. men of sci
ence are cropping into the mystery
Like the medieval scientists who
lived in dread of the ban OF Mother
Church. they are mostly working
secretly and are not telling half they
know. For science. that marvellous
machine of modern progress, has its
church, too, as II were; its orthodoxy
and its heterodoxy; it's hierarchy of
established rulers who excommunicate
and set autos-dafe for expounders of
heresies
So far the evidence these bold in
vestigators have unearthed is chiefly
negative, yet nevertheless highly sig
nificant. In the first place. one of
them found that physical death is ac.
companied by a sudden loss of bodily
weight varying from three-quarters of
an ounce TO nearly an ounce and a
quarter Some curious experiments
of this kind were made by DR.. Dun
can MacDougall, of Haverhill, Mass.
His first subject was a man dying
OF tuberculosis. He selected a pa
uent dying from this disease because
SO great an exhaustion characterizes
IT'S final stages that death occurs with
little or no muscular movement. With
patient quiet. the beam of the scales
can be kept true and any loss occur
ring will be evidenced
In this experiment the patient was
lying on a bed arranged on a light
framework which was built on very
delicately balanced platform scales
He was under observation three hours
and forty minutes before death. He
lost weight slowly at the rate OF an
ounce an hour, due to the evaporation
OF breath moisture and Precipitation.
Keenly the physician watched the
fading hours and minutes of the al
most spent life. And then-suddenly.
coincident with death-the beam end
of the scales dropped with an audi
Bile stroke, hitting against the lower
bar and remaining there with no re-
bound! The scales registered an In.
slant loss OF three-quarters OF an
ounce
What had gone? II could not have
been evaporation OF sweat, he decided.
for that had slowly left the body at
the rate OF tiny fraction OF an ounce
minute. whereas the sudden loss at
death had been many times as great.
At could not have been further tests
satisfied the doctor. the air i'm the
lungs DR. MacDougall was startled at
the weird phenomenon. Something
immaterial, yet evidently forceful and
OF weight. had departed with the life.
What in the world was IL?
The physician repeated his expert.
ments in the last hours of various 9th
or tuberculosis patients Always at
the supreme moment the stroke of the
beam came down with an audible re-
bort, and each time the scales told
the loss Of about an ounce. Could
this thing that so suddenly departed
be possibly viewed in its upward
flight?
Seized with a new hope. the expert
menter devised n clear white light to
rest along the body Of the subject in
the dying hour In other cases he
covered the bodies with the rainbow
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AS You Co.