KESPIEATION, AND ANIMALIZATION. 



151 



loreigh Memoirs, we meet with a few very curious instances of spontaneous 

 inflammation, or active combustion, having occurred in the human body. 

 The accident has usually been detected by the penetrating smell of burn- 

 ing and sooty films, which have diffused themselves to a considerable dis- 

 tance ; and the sufferers have in every instance been discovered dead, with 

 the body more or less completely burnt up, and containing in the burnt 

 parts nothing more than an oily, sooty, extremely fetid and crumbly mat- 

 ter. In one or two instances there has appeared, when the light was tOr 

 tally excluded, a faint lambent flame bickering over the limbs ; but the 

 general combustion was so feeble that the chairs and other furniture of the 

 room within the reach of the burning body have in no instance been found 

 more than scorched, and in most instances altogether uninjured. 



It is by no means easy to explain these extraordinary facts, but they 

 have been too frequent, and are too well authenticated in different coun- 

 tries, to justify our disbelief. In every instance but one the subjects have 

 been females, somewhat advanced in life, and apparently much addicted to 

 spirituous liquors. I shall hence only observe, in few words, that the ani- 

 mal body in itself consists of a variety of combustible materials ; and that 

 the process of respiration (though not completely established to be such) 

 has a very near alliance to that of combustion itself : that the usual heat of 

 the blood, taking that of man as our standard, is 98^ of Fahrenheit, and 

 under an inflammatory temperament may be 103° or 104° ; and hence, 

 though by no means sufliciently exalted for open or manifest combustion, 

 may be more than sufficiently so for a slow or smothered combustion ; 

 since the combustion of a dung^hill seldom exceeds 81°, and is not often 

 found higher in fermenting hay-stacks, when they first burst forth into 

 flame. The use of ardent spirits may possibly, in the cases before us, 

 have predisposed the system to so extraordinary an accident ; though we 

 all know that this is not a common result of such a habit, mischievous as 

 it is in other respects. The lambent flame emitted from the body is pro- 

 bably phosphorescent, and hence little likely to set fire to the surrounding 

 iurniture. It is not certain whether this flame originates spontaneously, 

 or is only spontaneously continued, after having been produced by a lighted 

 substance coming too nearly in contact with a body thus surcharged with 

 inflammable materials. 



Such, then, are the circulatory and respiratory systems in the most per- 

 fect animals : as mammals, birds, and amphibials. It should be observed, 

 however, that in birds the hollow bones themselves, and a variety of air- 

 cells that are connected with them, constitute, as we have already had oc- 

 casion to notice,* a part of the general respiratory organ, and endow them 

 with that levity of form which so peculiarly characterizes them, and which 

 is so skilfully adapted to their intention. It should be remarked, also, that 

 in most amphibious animals, and especially in the turtle, whose interior 

 structure is the most perfect of the entire class, the two ventricles, or larger 

 cavities of the heart, communicate something after the manner in which 

 they do in the human fetus. The lungs of this class are for the most past 

 unusually large ; and they have a power of extracting oxygene from water 

 as well as from air ; whence their capability of existing in both elements. 

 The oxygene, however, obtained from the water is not by a decomposi- 

 tion of the water into its elementary parts, but only by a separation of such 

 air as is loosely combined with it ; for if water be deprived of air or oxy- 



* Ser, I. I^ct, XI. p. 119. 



