The Sensation of Hanging and Browning.

Te Aroha News, Volume VII, Issue 462, 12 April 1890, Page 6

The Sensation of Hanging and Browning.

In the second article on ‘ TlVe Days of the Dandies,’ in this : month’s Blackwood, some curious examples are given by the writer of a well-known phenomenon - the fact that • the events of a whole lifetime will sometimes pass in a moment through the mind of a person who is on the point of death by drowning or suffocation. Speaking of the case of Lord Ponsonby, who was hanged by the mob in Paris in 1791 and cut down before life was extinct the author says : He (Lord Ponsonby) proceeded co give an account of his sensations on returning to consciousness. He could not have been actually suspended in mid-air more than a few seconds, and yet in that brief space of time all the events of his past life passed through his mind. It is true that his life to that date had not been a very eventful ' one, being only nineteen years of age ; but every past sensation was renewed in all its freshness. It is also remarkable that he did not at the time experience any sensation of fear; while, he added, his was an essentially nervous temperament. This remarkable mental power of calling up the past in moments of suspended animation I have heard frequently mentioned. One was the case of Count Zichy, in the Revolution of 1848, in Vienna. He was caught by the savage mob, hung like Lord Ponsonby in the middle of the street, when his own regiment of dragoons charged down and cut the cords as he was swinging in the air. lie fell to the ground and was supposed to bedead; but his recovery was a very different matter from Lord Ponsonby’s, for he suffered agonies, and for ten days had four men constantly with him. He described exactly the same sensation as Lord Ponsonby ; the scroll of what was a much longer life was unrolled, even the smallest detail rushed back on his memory : ,he had the same fearlessness at that moment, but he felt all the horror of the agony when the danger was past. A most interesting little book, called ‘ Admiral Baaaford’s Experiences of Drowning,’ bears testimony to this seemingly universal experience in sudden danger. ‘Thought succeeded thought,’ says the Admiral, * with a rapidity that is nob only indescribable, bub probably inconceivable by anyone who has nob himself been in a similar situation—the event that had just taken place, the effect it would have on pay family, and a thousand circumstances associated with home, travelling backward in retrograde succession.’ All this proves that duration of life does nob depend on hours,but on the number of impressions coo? voyed to the brain. • ]