94 



SCIENCE. 



[Vol. XIV. No. 340. 



congenital variation, and not the accidental scar, that the daughter 

 had inherited. 



AMATEUR PHOTOGRAPHY IN THE SUMMER OF 1889. 



Those who ventured to take photographs with the dry plates of 

 eight years ago thought the art a simple one, and well suited to the 

 needs of every one who was willing to go to any trouble in secur- 

 ing photographic record of sights and scenes in which he might be 

 interested. 



A year ago the Kodak was brought on the market. In this 

 camera, which is known to all, and whose products are so favor- 

 ably received wherever shown, in place of the glass negative of the 



past was substituted a strip of sensitized paper stretched between 

 two reels. 



This was but a partial solution of the problem, for the paper is 

 of necessity opaque, and to secure the best results it was necessary 

 to strip the delicate film from the paper and attach it to glass or 

 some other transparent support. This was a tedious process. 

 A recent discovery and invention by Mr. George Eastman of the 

 well-known firm in Rochester, obviate every difficulty. He has 

 succeeded in producing a strong and perfectly transparent support, 

 of great flexibility and extreme thinness, which can be wound upon 

 rollers, to be exposed, developed, and printed like ordinary glass 

 negatives. The transparent support is a modification of celluloid, 

 specially prepared by a process invented by Mr. Eastman. The 

 celluloid product is but four one-thousandths of an inch in thick- 

 ness, and the gelatine film upon it is one two-thousandth of an inch 



in thickness. It will thus be seen that a great magazine of photo- 

 graphic material can be carried in a very small space, and with no 

 inconvenience on account of weight. Every operator can develop 

 and print his own negatives and refill his magazine, with the exer- 

 cise of only ordinary skill. 



Mr. Eastman has removed the greatest difficulty in the way of 

 rapid and satisfactory outdoor work, while adding facility in indoor 

 photography, especially on large work. The handling of large 

 plates is always difficult, and attended with serious risks. The 

 flexible, transparent support makes the handling easy, and the re- 

 sults secure. The new support has been thoroughly tested. It 

 withstands sun-heat necessary in printing, and is unaffected by the 

 chemicals employed in development and other photographic pro- 

 cesses. 



The accompanying illustrations show the film-holder for the 

 Kodak camera. Fig. i shows the holder closed ; and Fig. 2, the 

 same open, with a view of the two reels. 



HEALTH MATTERS. 



The Alleged Spontaneous Combustion of the Human Body. 



When " Bleak House " appeared, in 1853, novel-readers were- 

 treated to a new sensation in the way of a death-scene, when 

 Krook was taken off the stage by spontaneous combustion, "of all 

 the deaths that can be died." The public shuddered, and medi- 

 cal readers smiled. The subject was then to most physicians, as- 

 it is now, well inside the border of medical mythology. 



Within the past year or two, several cases have been put on 

 record, which, with the list previously accumulated, serve to estab- 

 lish pretty clearly, in the opinion of The Boston Medical and Surgi- 

 cal Journal, " the fact of an occasional abnormally increased com- 

 bustibility of the human body, which, it should be observed, does 

 not necessarily imply ignitability, or true spontaneous combus- 

 tion." 



For instance: Dr. Booth's case, which is reported, with a photo- 

 graph of the nearly consumed remains, in the British Medical 

 Journal (vol. i. 1888, p. 841), is of a pensioner, aged sixty-five, of 

 very intemperate habits, who climbed into a hay-loft while drunk, 

 at nine P.M. Neighbors saw by a skylight a light struck, which 

 after a while was put out. At eight the next morning, the body,, 

 with all its soft parts consumed, was seen lying over a hole in the 

 floor which had nearly burned through, but had one or two joists 

 that kept the body from falling through. The chance of the ap- 

 plication of fire to the man's clothes is here distinctly stated ; and 

 the combustion, remarkable as it was, is not shown to have been 

 spontaneous. 



Again, Middlekamp, in the St. Louis Medical and Surgical 

 Jourtial, October, 1885, reported a similar case of nearly complete 

 combustion, where the victim, a man of sixty-six and a drunkard of 

 twenty years' standing, fired a gun at his own breast with a ram- 

 rod. Here the heat was so intense as to melt the ramrod and a 

 metal buckle. The body was consumed entirely, except the lower 

 part of the legs, the head, and the arms. 



In the Therapeutic Gazette of the current year, two more such 

 instances are reported. One of these. Dr. Clendenin's case, was 

 an old Irish woman, addicted to the excessive use of whiskey, of 

 which she had drunk a quart the day she died. She had always 

 been the last of the household to go to bed, and so always ex- 

 tinguished the tallow candle (their sole means of illumination). 

 There was also a fire in the kitchen stove. . The inner walls of the 

 house were covered with greasy soot, and the two old men who- 

 were the only other occupants were both asphyxiated. A hole 

 was found burned through the kitchen floor about two and one- 

 half by three feet square. Upon examining the opening in the 

 floor, a mass of cinders wasMiscovered on the ground beneath. 

 Upon removing them, the skull, the cervical, and half the dorsal 

 veretebrae were found reduced very nearly to a cinder, also about 

 six inches of the right femur, together with part of the ilium in 

 about the same state as the vertebrae. The feet were found in the- 

 shoes : the left foot was reduced to a cinder, the shoe being par- 

 tially calcined ; the other foot and shoe were reduced to a complete 

 cinder. On removing, the entire remains of a woman, who a few 

 hours previous had weighed one hundred and sixty pounds, were 

 placed in a box that would hold less than one bushel. The entire 

 remains weighed twelve pounds. The pine joint against which 

 the remaining cinders lay were slightly charred, but not burning 

 when found. 



To burn the human body, under ordinary circumstances, as the 

 editor of the journal states, is not an easy thing. The great heat 

 secured in crematories, and the length of time even then requisite 

 to incinerate the body, illustrate this fact. It has been shown 

 that the body is three-quarters water, and a great deal of combus- 

 tible material is a necessary adjunct to the successful reduction of 

 so non-inflammable a substance. What, then, is it that occasion- 

 ally imparts to it so abnormal a susceptibility to flame ? Here- 

 theories are at fault. We may safely say that it is not, as has been 

 claimed by some, alcohol deposited in the tissues : for Liebig found 

 that flesh saturated in that liquid would burn only until the alco- 

 hol was consumed. The hydrogen theory is also fanciful ; and 

 the best explanation, namely, an abundant deposit of fat in th& 

 cells of the body in such cases, fails to account for the fact that not 



