SPONTANEOUS COMBUSTION. 505 



burning of invisible fire in their entrails, and some had 

 cut off a foot or a hand where the burning began that it 

 should not go further." 



Another member of the Society supplemented Rolli with 

 an account of a carpenter who was set on fire by lightning 

 and burned for three days. Still another presented a re- 

 cent instance of a woman who ignited spontaneously be- 

 cause of the gin habit. And then came Dr. Cromwell 

 Mortimer, directly suggesting the electrical fire as a cause 

 of these automatic cremations. "The element of fire," 

 he says, 1 "may ... lie latent in fluid bodies ready to 

 become active as soon as it meets with air, or even to 

 kindle if it meets with sulphureous particles under proper 

 conditions. . . . Animals appearing more susceptible of 

 electric fire than other bodies greatly confirms these con- 

 jectures of the phosphoreal principles, and probably being 

 rendered electric to any high degree might prove a dan- 

 gerous experiment to a person habituated to the use of 

 spirituous liquors or to embrocations with camphorated 

 spirit of wine." 



Thus a new factor was added to those which were grad- 

 ually bringing both philosophers and people to a sort of 

 nervous exaltation, which is especially recognizable in the 

 exaggerated statements that soon filled the reports of the 

 experiments of the German scientists. They seemed to be 

 possessed with a feverish desire to intensify the strength 

 of the discharge, and all their energies were directed to 

 devising, for this purpose, improvements in the electrical 

 machine. " Such a prodigious power of electricity, " says 

 Priestley, "could they excite from their globes, whirled 

 by a large wheel and rubbed with woolen cloth or a dry 

 hand . . . that if we may credit their own accounts the 

 blood could be drawn from the finger by an electric spark, 

 the skin would burst, and a wound appear as if made by 

 caustic." 



One result is that the records now become mere descrip- 



1 Phil. Trans., No. 476, p. 473, 1745. 



