And just as combustions reveal their secret only in the very vividness of fire, and it would be useless to ask, once the flame was extinguished, what can remain in the inert powders, the coput mortuum, so it is in the act of voice and the brightness that it sheds over phenomena that truth is revealed: 'It is not the remains of the morbid combustion that the doctor should know, hut the species of the combustion'.