CASE OF COUNTESS ZANGARI. 369 



Verona. This lady, who was in the sixty-second year of 

 her age, retired to bed in her usual health. Here she 

 spent above three hours in familiar conversation with her 

 maid and in saying her prayers ; and having at last fallen 

 asleep, the door of her chamber was shut. As her maid 

 was not summoned at the usual hour, she went into the 

 bed-room to wake her mistress ; but receiving no answer 

 she opened the window, and saw her corpse on the floor 

 in the most dreadful condition. At the distance of four 

 feet from the bed there was a heap of ashes. Her legs, 

 with the stockings on, remained untouched, and the head, 

 half -burned, lay between them. Nearly all the rest of 

 the body was reduced to ashes. The air in the room was 

 charged with floating soot. A small oil lamp on the floor 

 was covered with ashes, but had no oil in it ; and in two 

 candlesticks, which stood upright upon a table, the cotton 

 wick of both the candles was left, and the tallow of both 

 had disappeared. The bed was not injured, and the 

 blankets and sheets were raised on one side as if a 

 person had risen up from it. From an examination of all 

 the circumstances of this case, it has been generally 

 supposed that an internal combustion had taken place; 

 that the lady had risen from her bed to cool herself, and 

 that, in her way to open the window, the combustion had 

 overpowered her, and consumed her body by a process in 

 which no flame was produced which could set fire to the 

 furniture or the floor. The Marquis Scipio Maffei was 

 informed by an Italian nobleman who passed through 

 Cesena a few days after this event, that he heard it stated 

 in that town, that the Countess Zangari was in the habit, 

 when she felt herself indisposed, of washing all her body 

 with camphorated spirit of wine. 



So recently as 1744 a similar example of spontaneous 

 combustion occurred in our own country at Ipswich. A 

 fisherman's wife of the name of Grace Pett, of the parish 



