390 PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS. [aNNO 1794. 



tained, how many things might have led to a much earlier investigation ; narti- 

 cularly so, had the writings of many great men been equally examined, with those 

 observations which, though apparently very trifling, have often excited general 

 attention. The conversion of animal muscle into a fatty matter gives us a very 

 striking example. The celebrated Sir Thomas Brown, in his very learned and 

 carious treatise entitled Hydriotaphia, assures us, that he has found a soap- 

 like substance in an hydropical body. His words are as follow, viz. " In an 

 hydropical body, 10 years buried in a church-yard, we met with a fat concretion, 

 where the nitre of the earth and the salt and lixivious liquor of the body, had coa- 

 gulated large lumps of fat into the consistence of the hardest Castile soap ; whereof 

 part remaineth with us." Lord Bacon, in his work entitled Sylva Sylvarum, also 

 mentions this curious circumstance : " You may turn (almost) all flesh into a 

 fatty substance; if you take flesh and cut it into pieces, and put the pieces into 

 a glass covered with parchment ; and so let the glass stand 6 or 7 hours in 

 boiling water. It may be an experiment of profit for making grease or fat for 

 many uses ; but then it must be of such flesh as is not edible, as horses, dogs, 

 bears, foxes, badgers, &c." 



Animal muscle, having lost its living principle, has been generally supposed to 

 undergo, when exposed either to the action of air or water, that kind of decom- 

 position only which is known by the name of the putrefactive fermentation. 

 Since the discovery of the bodies in the Cimetiere des Innocens at Paris, this 

 subject has been more attended to ; and a substance much resembling spermaceti 

 is now known to be formed by combinations which take the animal flesh and 

 water. If you put flesh under water, and let it stay some time, it will get very 

 ofl^ensive, and ihe putrefactive fermentation will in some measure most assuredly 

 take place. This seems to have been the reason why the substance remaining 

 in the water had not been more accurately examined, it being imagined that as 

 this decomposition had commenced, the whole would be changed in the same 

 manner. It would appear strange, if the same substance, exposed to the action 

 of 2 such difl^t-rent bodies as air and water, should undergo precisely the same 

 change. Tliat they do not, has been lately proved by many experiments, and 

 that the putrefactive fermentation is not at all necessary in the formation of this 

 fatty matter, some of the following experiments will show. 



After having seen some of the matter found in the Cimetiere des Innocens 

 at Paris, Mr. G. concluded that in some situations the same kind of substance 

 might be easily found ; accordingly he examined some of the macerating tubs 

 belonging to anatomical schools in town, and found that in most of them the 

 flesh was nearly changed into this kind of fat. By the indulgence of Dr. Pegge, 

 the anatomical professor in Oxford, he was permitted to examine the receptacle 

 in which the bodies are deposited, after he has finished lecturing on them. This 



