316 NATURE AND LIFE. 



merit of its appearance varies with the causes of death and 

 the degree of outward temperature. When death is the 

 result of a putrid malady, putrefaction begins almost im- 

 mediately when the body has grown cold. It is the same 

 when the atmosphere is warm. 1 In general, in our cli- 

 mates, the work of decomposition becomes evident after 

 from thirty-eight to forty hours. Its first effects are 

 noticeable on the skin of the stomach; this takes on a 

 greenish discoloration, which soon spreads and covers suc- 

 cessively the whole surface of the body. At the same 

 time the moist parts, the eye, the inside of the mouth, 

 soften and decay ; then the cadaverous odor is gradually 

 developed, at first faint and slightly fetid, a mouldy smell, 

 then a pungent and ammoniacal stench. Little by little 

 the flesh sinks in and grows watery ; the organs cease to 

 be distinguishable. Every thing is seized upon by what is 

 termed putridity. If the tissues are examined under the 

 microscope at this moment, we no longer recognize any of 

 the anatomical elements of which the organic fabric is made 

 up in its normal state. " Our flesh," Bossuet exclaims in 

 his funeral-sermon on Henrietta of England, " soon changes 

 its nature, our body takes another name ; even that of a 

 corpse, used because it still exhibits something of the 

 human figure, does not long remain with it. It becomes a 

 thing without a shape, which in every language is without 

 a name." When structure has wholly disappeared, nothing 

 more remains but a mixture of saline, fat, and proteic mat- 

 ters, which are either dissolved and carried away by water, 

 or slowly burned up by the air's oxygen, and transmuted 

 into new products, and the whole substance of the body, 

 except the skeleton, returns piecemeal to the earth whence 

 it came forth. Thus the ingredients of our organs, the 



1 Yet a very high temperature acts as cold does in delaying the mo- 

 ment of putrefaction by so coagulating the albuminoid matters as to 

 make them less liable to decay. 



