316 NATURE AND LIFE. 
ment 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.’ 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 
1Yet 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. 
