230 Mr. Waldie’s investigations connected [No. 3, 
nauseous smell, but one not so characteristic as that produced by 
burning horn or wool for instance. 
Nevertheless not to neglect any means of obtaining information on 
the subject, I not only, in the course of ascertaining the weight of 
organic matter by burning it off, paid attention to the appearances 
then presented, but afterwards made a few experiments on purpose. 
But with all I cannot concur in the satisfaction expressed by Dr. Angus 
Smith on the results, as quoted by Dr. Macnamara in his review of the 
pamphlet.* He speaks of the remarkably clear insight given by 
boiling down a few thousand grains of water and burning the residue. 
He says, ‘‘ We can by the eye and the smell detect humous and peaty 
acids, nitrogenous organic substances, and nitrates, and estimate their 
amount toa very useful degree of accuracy. We may even decide 
by it the animal or vegetable origin of the matter.” Now I have 
carefully evaporated down repeatedly quantities of 50,000 and 100,000 
grains of water and attended to these appearances, and the only 
conclusion I came to was, that the information obtained was very 
limited and unsatisfactory. Ihave also varied the experiment and 
instead of burning the matter in an open platinum crucible have heated 
it ina glass test tube. For some ofthe objects in view this is a 
better plan; and I compared in this way samples of water of the rainy 
season, of the cold season, and of the hot season during flood tide, 
For the latter, which is a mixture of river and sea water it is necessary 
to mix the saline matter with some dry carbonate of soda, or better, to 
evaporate the water to dryness with this admixture, in order to prevent 
the evolution of hydrochloric acid vapours. The mouth of the tube is to 
be loosely closed with a glass stopper which is removed from time to 
time to examine the smell and try with test papers. Examined in this 
way, all those samples gave some ammoniacal vapour with no very 
marked difference; all gave a somewhat urinous animal smell, but 
not one the characteristic smell of burning flesh or horn: there were 
slight variations, but none very distinct. The rainy season water gave 
more of the smell of burning vegetable matter than the others, this 
being the most distinctive point observed ; but altogether the informa- 
tion obtained was very small. 
After the failure of all these plans, there remained but one likely to 
* Indian Medical Gazette, April, 1866, 
