VOL. XLVIII.] PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS. 553 



to the touch, being put into new-made stone hme-water, which was only milk- 

 warm, dissolved also, and the bones of the head were rotten and brittle. 



June 18, two small eels, skinned, were put into stone lime-water. June 22, 

 one of them, which was firm to handle, when boiled was soft and pappy. June 

 25, the other eel was the same when boiled. 



In order to try whether the lime, which adhered to, or had soaked into, the 

 flesh of the fish, which had lain in lime-water, had the quality of thus dissolving 

 the texture of the flesh in boiling, Dr. H. boiled a small eel, and a morsel of 

 mutton, for 10 minutes, in stone lime-water, when they were boiled enough, 

 and were of a due degree of firmness, and not pappy. A like eel, boiled in well- 

 water, was boiled enough in 5 mirmtes. Hence it appears, that the lime does 

 not, in boiling so short a time, dissolve the texture of the flesh into a pap, 

 which must therefore be the effect of unfetid putrefaction. 



But lime-water made of chalk lime has very little of an antiseptic quality. 

 For last year, in the month of May, he put some gudgeons, and an eel, into 

 our common lime-water, and in 7 days boiled one of the gudgeons, but found it 

 too putrid to eat. After 28 days he boiled another, and it dissolved almost into 

 insensible parts; which shows, that it was much putrefied. 



Dr. Alston likewise informed him, that he put a piece of veal in pounded or 

 slacked stone-lime, which in a week became tough and dry. Dr. H. put a piece 

 of veal, from half to three-quarters of an inch thick, into chalk-lime, on May 

 the 10th, and on the 31st of the same month it had a putrid smell, and was in 

 the middle red and raw, with a thin hard outside. 



Having communicated these experiments to Dr. Pringle (whose trials having 

 been made with chalk lime-water, which is in common use here, agreed with 

 the last of mine), he observed, that the difference between stone lime-water and 

 chalk lime-water, might probably consist in this : the chalk, before calcination, 

 being a highly septic substance,* if some of its particles were not fully calcined, 

 these, by mixing with the water, would impart to it some degree of a putre- 

 fying quality, contrary to that virtue the water receives from such parts as are 

 sufliciently burnt. That the same would be the case of shells, also septics; and 

 therefore that the lime-water, made either of chalk or shells, would prove more 

 or less antiseptic, or even continue septic, according to the degree of calcination. 

 He added, that as all his experiments, relating to the antiseptic quality of lime- 

 water, were made in a furnace heated to the degree of human blood, a circum- 

 stance which he had marked in his Observations,-f- the uncalcined parts of the 



• Observ. on »he Diseases of the Army, 1st ed. p. 390. — Orig. 



t To one of the experiments preceding that on the lime-water, the author subjoins the following 

 note: " All the following experiments, whether made in the lamp furnace, or by the fire, were in 

 a degree of heat equal to that of the human blood, viz. 100° of Fahrenheit's scale." p. 383.— Orig. 

 VOL. X. 4 B 



