RESPIRATION, AND ANIMALIZATION. 



Lo7 



surround it ; or, piercing their interstices, are thrown off into the atmos- 

 phere in the form of insensible vapour. In consequence of which, when 

 a body thus buried is dug up a few weeks after its interment, instead of 

 being converted into its original elements, it is found changed into a natu- 

 ral mummy, altogether as hard and as capable of preservation as any arti- 

 ficial mummy, prepared with the costliest septics employed on such occa- 

 sions. 



When dead animal organs are deposited in situations in which only a 

 very small portion of atmospheric air is capable of having access to them, 

 a change indeed takes place, but of a very different description from that 

 of putrefaction, and which is of a most curious and extraordinary nature. 

 For in such cases the animal organs, instead of being converted into their 

 original elements, are transmuted into fat, wax, or spermaceti ; or rather 

 into a substance sui generis^ and possessing a middle nature between that 

 of the two former, whence the French chemists have given it the appella- 

 tion of ADiPociRE ; a term not strictly classical, but for which the chemists 

 of our own country have not hitherto substituted any other. 



This result is observed, not unfrequently, in bodies that are drowned, 

 and rendered incapable of rising to the surface of the water ; for in such a 

 situation but very little air, and consequently very little oxygene, can reach 

 them from the external atmosphere. And it is to these circumstances we 

 ought, perhaps, to resolve the singular appearance in the body of Colonel 

 Pollen, who was wrecked a few years ago in the Baltic Sea, near Memel, 

 and within sight of the coast ; and whose corpse was six months after- 

 wards thrown on shore, with the features of the face so little varied, that 

 every one of his acquaintances recognised him at the first glance. The body 

 had probably been entangled in the submarine sands on first sinking, and 

 been retained in this situation for months, cut off from that exposure to ex- 

 ternal air which is absolutely necessary in all cases of patrefaction properly 

 so called. A similar conversion into wax-fat was observed also in 1786 

 and 1787, on opening the fosses communes^ or common burial pits in the 

 churchyard of the Innocents at Paris, for the purpose of laying the foun- 

 dation of a new pile of buildings. For the bodies that on this occasion 

 were dug up, instead of being dissolved into their elementary corpuscles, 

 were found for the most part converted into this very substance of waxy 

 fat or adipocire. The populace were alarmed at the phasnomenon, and 

 the chemists were applied to for an explanation. M. Fourcroy, among 

 others, attended upon this occasion ; and his solution, which will apply to 

 all cases of a similar kind, referred the whole to the extreme difficulty 

 with which external air had obtained any communication with the in- 

 humed bodies, in consequence of the close adaptation of coffin to coffin, 

 and the compactness with which every pit had been filled up. Difficult, 

 however, as this communication must have been, he conceived that, from 

 the natural elasticity of atmospheric air, some small portion of it had still 

 entered, conveying, perhaps, just oxygene enough to excite the new 

 action of decomposition. This having commenced, the constituent oxy- 

 gene of the dead animal organs would itself be progressively disengaged, 

 and rapaciously laid hold of by all the other constituent principles, from 

 their strong and general affinity to it. During this gradual evolution, 

 there can be little doubt that the greater part of it would be seized by the 

 predominant azote, a very considerable part by the carbone, and the rest 

 by the hydrogene ; and the result would be, upon the total but very slow 

 escape of the constituent and disengaged oxygene, that the whole 



