14 CHARLES BALGUY, M.D. 
Charles Balguy was admitted pensioner of St. John’s College, 
Cambridge, on the 5th July, 1725. His tutor was Mr. B. 
Edmundson. He did not proceed in arts, but took the degree of 
Bachelor of Medicine in 1731. 
In 1734 he contributed to the Zransactions of the Royal Society 
an account of “the dead bodies of a man and woman preserved 
49 years in the Moors of Derbyshire.” He is then described as 
of Peterborough, and I presume that he was then practising physic 
in that city. The account he gives is so curious that I venture to 
give it at length, quoting, however, the abridgement of the 
Philosophical Transactions.* 
**These two persons were lost in a great snow on the moors, 
‘in the parish of Hope, near the Woodlands, in Derbyshire, January 
14th, 1674, and not being found till the 3rd of May following, the 
snow lasting probably the greater part of that time, they then 
smelt so strong that the Coroner ordered them to buried on the 
spot. They lay in the peat moors 28 years 9 months before they 
were looked at again, when some countrymen, having observed 
the extraordinary quality of this soil in preserving dead bodies 
from corrupting, were curious enough to open the ground to see if 
these persons had been so preserved, and they found them in no 
way altered, the colour of their skin being fair and natural, their 
flesh soft as that of persons newly dead. They were afterwards 
exposed for a sight 20 years, though they were much changed in 
that time by being so often uncovered, and in 1716 their condition 
was as follows, viz:—The man perfect, his beard strong, and 
about a quarter of an inch long, the hair of his head short, his 
skin hard and of a tanned leather colour, pretty much the same as 
the liquor and earth they lay in. The woman by some rude 
people had been taken out of the ground, to which one may well 
impute her greater decay ; one leg was off, the flesh decayed, the 
bone sound ; on her face the upper lip and tip of her nose decayed, 
but no where else. Her hair was long and springy, like that of a 
living person. They were afterwards buried in Hope Church, 
* Philosophical Transactions, No. 434, p. 413. 
