ANIMAL HEAT. 235 



air was from 3 to 32. No relation was observable be- 

 tween the temperature of the body and of the atmosphere y; it 

 thus appearing that the temperature is more steady under cold 

 than heat. I may here remark that, if an animal is drowned in 

 hot water, a puppy or kitten, for example, in water at 90 or 

 120, the action of its heart irrecoverably ceases sooner than 

 if it is drowned in cold water. 2 Under the want of respiration 

 the heat is too exhausting for the powers of the system. When 

 animals recover, they regain their warmth slowly, even more 

 slowly, Mr. Nunnelly says, than after immersion in cold water. 

 Oxygen also excites so much, that it exhausts and lowers the 

 temperature. 



Another wonderful circumstance is the impunity with which 

 great changes of temperature are borne by persons in good 

 health, and under neither mental nor corporeal accidental de- 

 pression at the moment. The Russian, while in a vapour-bath of 

 perhaps 167, has several large vessels of cold water poured upon 

 him : and the Finnish peasant passes reeking from it, and rolls in the 

 snow, with exquisite delight. Sir Joseph Banks and the rest of the 

 party passed from the high temperature mentioned into the cold 

 air, and even staid some minutes before they dressed, without the 

 least injury. During an unnaturally high temperature, the sudden 

 application of cold is very agreeable. 



No phenomenon in living bodies is more remarkable than their 

 peculiar temperature, and no one was of more difficult explan- 

 ation before the modern progress of chemistry. Dr. Mayow had 

 indeed advanced, that it depended on respiration, and that this 

 was a process similar to combustion, and, so far from cooling the 

 blood, as others believed, supplied it with heat. 



If two different bodies are placed in a temperature higher or 

 lower than their own for a certain length of time, they will, 

 at the end of the period, be found, not of the same, but of differ- 

 ent temperatures. That which has the higher temperature is 

 said to have a smaller capacity for caloric ; that which has the 

 lower, a greater capacity. To raise the former to a given tem- 

 perature, therefore, requires less caloric than to raise the latter 

 to the same degree. 



y Journal of a Second Voyage, p. 157. 



2 Experiments by Sir Astley Cooper, in 1790, published from his MS. ; by 

 Dr. Hodgkin, in the translation of Dr. Edwards's work, p. 472. sqq. Similar 

 results are there related by Mr. Nunnelly. 



