Robert E. Lee

Illness and death
On September 28, 1870, Lee suffered a stroke that made speech impossible. Lee died from the effects of pneumonia, a little after 9 a.m., October 12, 1870, two weeks after the stroke, in Lexington, Virginia. He was buried underneath Lee Chapel at Washington and Lee University, where his body remains today. According to J. William Jones' Personal Reminiscences, Anecdotes, and Letters of Gen. Robert E. Lee, his last words, on the day of his death, were "Tell Hill he must come up. Strike the tent," but this is debatable because of conflicting accounts. Since Lee's stroke resulted in aphasia, last words may have been impossible.

TIME

The links that are emerging between movement and meaning have inspired some scientists to see the mirror-neuron system as the biological foundation on which human language is constructed. Such speculation is supported indirectly by the fact that Broca's area--a critical language center in the left hemisphere of the human brain--appears to be a close analogue of the premotor mirror region in monkeys. Broca's area, it turns out, is important for sign language as well as spoken language, and its connection to the mirror system has led Rizzolatti and U.S.C. neuroscientist Michael Arbib to propose that language traces its roots to hand gestures and facial expressions that, over time, became increasingly complex.