SHUT IN THE FREEZING- ROOM.

Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 3132, 12 July 1881, Page 4

SHUT IN THE FREEZING- ROOM.

_ Edgar Allen Poe might have invented the little story—a perfectly true one —sent from New South Wales fast week about Mr Jervaulx's imprisonment in the freezingroom of the Orange Slaughtering Company's works, of which he was manager. The Btory has some touches of horror which are exactly in Poe's manner. Mr Jervaulx entered the freezing-room—probably a low, dark cell—to examine the meat. The pressure of the warm external air shut the iron door violently after him, and his utmost efforts failed to reopen it. He shouted for help, but the noise of the machinery prevented his being heard. Fancy the agony of the situation ! He was breathing an atmosphere like that of the 'frozen continent' in the Miltonic under-world, where

The parching air Burnß frore, and cold performs the effect of fire. After twenty minutes of that frost-fire torture —as the vie im knew full well—be would be a dead man. In twenty minutes tbe blood in his veins would be ice, his heart a stone, and his body pulseless and rigid as a statue. Ten minutes actually passed, when, by a miraculous chance, the machinery was stopped for oiling, and, the sufferer's cries" being heard, hf was dragged out of the vault of death already half insensible. In the hands of Poe ' this story might have served as the basis for a thrilling scientific romance. Mr Jervaulx would have been allowed to put in the other ten minutes, and would havo been discovered in the condition of a humun icicle. His body would then have been sent in its frozen state to London, thawed out discreetly under supervision of a committee of savuns, and restored to life. Now, wild as such a speculation seema, it can hardly be said to transcend the possible. An article of Mr R. A. Proctor's on 'Suspended Animation' which recently appeared in the 1 Nineteenth Century ' discusses seriously the question of recovery after death or apparentdeath from freezing. It seems that the distinguished physician, Dr. Eichardson, has for many years been experimenting on the possibility of suspending life for long spaces by the action of cold or chemical agents. ' In one of my lectures on death from cold,' says the investigator, ' which I delivered in the winter session of 1867, some fish which, during a hard frost, had been frozen in a tank at Newcastle-on-Tyne, were sent up to me by rail. They were produced in the complexly frozen state at the lecture, and by careful thawing many of them were restored to perfect life. At my Croomian lecture on muscular irritability after death, a similar fact was illustrated from frogs.' To make recovery sure, ' the utmost care mußt be taken to thaw gradually,' and in the case of warm-blooded animals this is the whole difficulty. ' A healthy warm-blooded animal, suddenly and equally frozen through all its parts,' is not necessarily dead at all, but generally dies in tho process of thawing, since 'it is next to impossible to thaw equally and simultaneously all the fluids.' Yet, ' in every young animals it may be done. Young kittens, a clay or two old, that have been drowned in ice-cold water, will recover, after two hours' immersion] almost to a certainty, if brought into a temperature of 98 degrees Fahrenheit.' If a frozen kitten can be restored to life why not a frozen man ? The difference is only one of degree. No one ought to grudge Mr Jervaulx his timely escape ; but I can imagine some enthusiastic sayan, as he reads the account, heaving a sigh of regret that so interesting an experiment was not allowed to go on to comjjletion.—' Civis 'in the Witness.