the most lasting defiance to corruption.[B 1] In an hydropical body, ten years buried in the churchyard, we met with a fat concretion, where the nitre of the earth, and the salt and lixivious liquor of the body, had coagulated large lumps of fat into the consistence of the hardest Castile soap, whereof part remaineth with us.[B 2] After a battle with the Persians, the Roman corpses decayed in few days, while the Persian bodies remained dry and uncorrupted. Bodies in the same ground do not uniformly dissolve, nor bones equally moulder; whereof, in the opprobrious disease, we expect no long duration. The body of the Marquis of Dorset seemed sound and handsomely cereclothed, that after seventy-eight years was found uncorrupted.[A 1] Common tombs preserve not beyond powder: a firmer consistence and compage of parts might be expected from arefaction, deep burial, or charcoal. The greatest antiquities of mortal bodies may remain in putrefied bones, whereof, though we take not in the pillar of Lot's wife, or metamorphosis of Ortelius,[A 2][B 3] some may be older than pyramids, in the putrefied relicks of the general inundation. When Alexander opened the tomb of Cyrus, the remaining bones discovered his proportion, whereof urnal
- ↑ Of Thomas, Marquis of Dorset, whose body being buried 1530, was 1608, upon the cutting open of the cerecloth, found perfect and nothing corrupted, the flesh not hardened, but in colour, proportion, and softness like an ordinary corpse newly to be interred. Burton's Descript. of Leicestershire.
- ↑ In his map of Russia.
- ↑ hair, &c.] This assertion of the durability of human hair has been corroborated by modern experiment. M. Pictet, of Geneva, instituted a comparison between recent human hair and that from a mummy brought from Teneriffe, with reference to the constancy of those properties which render hair important as a hygrometrick substance. For this purpose, hygrometers, constructed according to the principles of Saussure were used; one with a fresh hair, the other from the mummy. The results of the experiments were, that the hygrometrick quality of the Guanche hair is sensibly the same as that of recent hair.—Edin. Phil. Journal, xiii, 196.
- ↑ In an hydropical body, &c.] This substance was afterwards found in the cemetery of the Innocents at Paris, by Fourcroy, and became known to the French chemists under the name of adipo-cire. Sir Thomas is admitted to have been the first discoverer of it.
- ↑ metamorphosis, &c.] His map of Russia (Theatrum orbit Terrarum, fol. Loud. 1606) exhibits but one "metamorphosis,"—a vignette of some figures kneeling before a figure seated in a tree, who is sprinkling something upon his audience. On other trees in the distance hang several figures. This is the legend beneath:—"Kergessigens catervatim degit, id est in hordis: habetque ritum hujusmodi. Cum rem divinam ipsorum sacerdos peragit, sanguinem, lac et fimum jumentorum accipit, ac terræ miscet, inque via quoddam infundit eoque arborem scandit, atque concione habita, in populum spargit, atque hæc aspersio pro Deo habetur et colitur. Cum quis diem inter illos obit, loco sepulturæ arboribus suspendit."
