Volume 1

The works of Sir Thomas Browne / edited by Simon Wilkin.

Thomas Browne

Date:: 1890-1893

Credit: The works of Sir Thomas Browne / edited by Simon Wilkin. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by Royal College of Physicians, London. The original may be consulted at Royal College of Physicians, London.

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$and hair, give the most lasting defiance to corrupt! on .*> 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 Cas- tile soap, whereof part remaiueth witla us7 After a battle with the Persians, the Eoman 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; wliereof 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.* 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 OrteliuSjt ^ some may be older than pyramids, in the putre- * Of Thomas, Marquis of Dorset^ whose body teing 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 soft- ness like an ordinary corpse newly to be interred.—Burton's Descnpt. of Leicestershire. t In his map of Hussia. ^ hair, ttc] This assertion of the durability of human hair has been corroborated by modern experiment. M. Pictet, of Geneva, instituted .1 comparison between recent human hair and that from a mummy brought from Teneriffe, with reference to the constancy of those proper- ties which render hair important as a hygrometrick substance. For this purpose, hygrometers, constructed according to the principles of Saussure were used ; one with a fi-esh hair, the other from the mummy. The results of the experiments were, that the hygi-ometrick quality of the Guanche hair is sensibly the same as that of recent hair.—Edin. P/iil- Journal, xiii. 196. ^ In an hydropical body, etc.] This substance was afterwards found in the cemetery of the Innocents at Paris, by Pourcroy, and became known to the French chemists under the name of adipu-cire. Sir Thomas is admitted to have been the first discoverer of it. mdamoi-phosis, ttc] His map of Russia {Theatrum orbis Terrarum, fol. Lond. 1606) exhibits but one met.imorphosis,—a vignette of some figures kneeling before a figure seated in a tree, who is sjirinkling Boniething upon his audience. On other trees in the distance h?Jig$

The works of Sir Thomas Browne / edited by Simon Wilkin.

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