more modern methods, I will give its quaint and curious details and results.*

"The body which is to be embalmed for a long continuance must first of all be emboweled, keeping the heart apart that it bee embalmed as the kinsfolkes may thinke fit. Also the braine, the scull being divided with a saw, shall be taken out. Then shall you make deepe incisions alongst the armes, thighes, legges, backe, loynes, and buttockes, especially where the greater veines and arteries runne, first, that by these meanes the blood may be pressed forth, which otherwise would putrifie, and then that there may be space to put in the aromaticke powders. The whole body shall be washed over with a sponge dipped in aqua vitæ and strong vinegar, wherein shall be boiled wormewood, aloes, coloquintida, common salt and alum. Then these incisions and all the passages and open places of the body and the three bellys shall be stuffed with the following spices grossely powdered: R.-Pulv. rosar., chamomil. melil. balsam, menthæ, aneth. saluiæ, lauend. rosism. maioram. thymi, absinthii, cyperi, calami aromatici, gentianæ, ireos flor. assæ odoratæ, caryophyll. nucis moschatæ, cinnamomi, styracis, calamitæ, benioini, myrrhæ, aloes, santal. [with exquisite indefiniteness], quod sufficit. Let the incisions be sowed up, and forthwith let the whole body be anointed with turpentine dissolved with oyle of roses and chamomile. Then wrap it in linen cloath and ceare cloaths. I put in mind hereby, that so the embalming may become more durable, to steepe the bodys in a woodden tubbe filled with strong vinegar and the decoction of aromaticke bitter things, as aloes, rue, coloquintida and wormwoode, and there keep them for twenty days, pouring in thereunto eleven or twelve pints of aqua vitæ." Alcohol is the real means, you will observe. And now for the result. "I have at home the body of one that was hanged, which I begged of the sheriff, embalmed after this manner, * Op. cit., pp. 1130, 1132.

which remains sound for more than twenty-five yeeres, so that you may tell all the muscles of the right side (which I have cut up even to their heads, and plucked them from those that are next them for distinction's sake, that so I may view them with my eyes and handle them with my hands, that by renuing my memory I may worke more certainely and surely when as I have any more curious operations to be performed). The left side remains whole, and the lungs, heart, diaphragma, stomache, spleene, kidneyes, beard, haires, yea, and the nailes, which being pared [he adds with charming naïveté], I have often observed to grow again to their former bignesse."

A century later than Paré, Ruysch, as we have seen, was said to have the most astonishing means for the preservation of his subjects. But we must make large allowances for the natural exaggeration of the extremely happy results of what was then a new art. Nor should we be the better off did we possess the secret of his contemporary De Bilsius, a noted charlatan of Rotterdam, whose boasted method, Haller says, was bought by the States of Brabant for the enormous sum of 122,000 florins, or more than four times the price of Ruysch's first museum. The bodies he pretended to embalm for the University of Louvain were soon destroyed, and, apparently in proof of the inefficacy of his own method, so foul was the air of the rooms in which he prepared his subjects, that it was said to have been the cause of the consumption to which he fell a victim.*

The traveller in Europe to-day finds a number of specimens of bodies preserved either by art or by nature, curious alike to the antiquary and the anatomist. In Milan is the body of St. Carlo Borromeo, who died in 1584; on the Rhine, near Bonn, in an old monastery, lie over a score of monks in cassock and cowl, placed in its vault before Columbus had discovered the New World; and again, in the church of St. *Bayle et Thillaye, op. cit., vol. ii, pp. 84, 85.

Thomas, at Strasburg, are seen the bodies of the Count of Nassau and his daughter over six hundred years old. The skin is yellow and shrivelled, but perfectly preserved; the small clothes of the father have been replaced by imitations, but the clothes of the daughter are intact. The lace on her blue gown is perfect, bunches of silver flowers adorn her hair, jewels lie on her breast, and even diamond rings clasp the shrivelled fingers as in mockery of death. All of these have been probably preserved by the aluminous soils in which they were placed. Cold has done the same work for the ghastly remains in the morgue on top of the great St. Bernard, while desiccation has shrivelled both features and limbs into contortions worthy of purgatory.

The largest collection of bodies preserved, not by nature, but by art, and by the simplest method, namely, that of desiccation by means of artificial heat, is in the monastery of the Capuchins, near Palermo. All its inmates who have died for the last two hundred and fifty years, more than two thousand in number, stand upright in ghostly companionship in the niches of its subterranean galleries.*

None of these means, however, would do for dissection. For practical anatomy the introduction of alcohol without the numerous drugs that Paré used, was the first efficient means which rendered patient and prolonged dissection available, and Cuvier points to its use as an indispensable step in the progress of comparative anatomy, as it rendered possible

*The reader who is curious in such things will find many other such instances described in full in Pettigrew's Hist. Egypt. Mummies, and in Harlan's Gannal's Hist. of Embalming, 8vo, Philada., 1840. Among them are not only full accounts of the Egyptian mummies, but also of those of Peru, Mexico, the Guanches, etc., and of the bodies preserved at Bordeaux, Toulouse, etc. Dr. A. B. Granville's Essay on Egyptian Mummies, Phil. Trans., 1825, pp. 969 et seqq., also contains some interesting facts, including a case of ovarian disease discovered in a mummy. † Abucasis in the twelfth century first showed how to get spirits from wine. Raymond Lully (thirteenth century) first dehydrated it by carb. potass. Gmelin's Handb. Chem., vol. viii, p. 194.