368 LETTERS ON NATURAL MAGIC. 



Boulogne, certain people of the territory of Nivers were 

 burning with invisible fire, and that some of them cut off 

 a foot or a hand where the burning began, in order to 

 arrest the calamity. Nor have these effects been confined 

 to man. In the time of the Eoman consuls Gracchus and 

 Juventius, a flame is said to have issued from the mouth 

 of a bull without doing any injury to the animal. 



The reader will judge of the decree of credit which 

 may belong to these narrations when he examines the 

 effects of a similar kind which have taken place in less 

 fabulous ages, and nearer our own times. John Henry 

 Gohausen informs us, that a Polish gentleman in the time 

 of the Queen Bona Sforza, having drunk two dishes of a 

 liquor called brandy- wine, vomited flames, and was burned 

 by them, and Thomas Bartholin* thus describes a similar 

 accident: "A poor woman at Paris used to drink spirit 

 of wine plentifully for the space of three years, so as to 

 take nothing else. Her body contracted such a com- 

 bustible disposition, that one night, when she lay down 

 on a straw couch, she w r as all burned to ashes except her 

 skull and the extremities of her fingers." John Christ 

 Sturmius informs us in the German Ephemerides, that in 

 the northern countries of Europe flames often evaporate 

 from the stomachs of those who are addicted to the 

 drinking of strong liquors ; and he adds, " that seventeen 

 years before, three noblemen of Courland drank by 

 emulation strong liquors, and two of them died scorched 

 and suffocated by a flame which issued from their 

 stomach." 



One of the most remarkable cases of spontaneous 

 combustion is that of the Countess Cornelia Zangari and 

 Bandi of Cesena, which has been minutely described by 

 the Eeverend Joseph Bianchini, a prebend in the city of 



* Ada Medico, et Philosophica Hafniensia, 1673 



