From this point of view, I made a rapid exploration, and I questioned the various corpses left almost intact; I sought in some portion of the body, common to all, a form or a sign invariably found in all.

The hand furnished me that sign and responded fully to my question.

I noticed, in fact, that in all these corpses the thumb exhibited a singular attitude—­that of adduction or attraction inward, which I had never noted either in persons waking or sleeping.

This was a flash of light to me.  To be yet more sure of my discovery, I examined a number of arms severed from the trunk; they showed the same tendency.  I even saw hands severed from the forearm; and, in spite of this severing of the flexor muscles, the thumb still revealed this same sign.  Such persistence in the same fact could not allow of the shadow of a doubt:  I possessed the sign-language of death, the semeiotics of the dead.

I rejoiced, foreseeing the service which this discovery would render upon a battle-field, for instance, where more than one man risks being buried alive.  I divined, moreover, something of its artistic 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.