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 The skin is yellow and shrivelled, but perfectly preserved; the small clothes of the father have been replaced by imitations, but the clothes of the daughter are intact.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.

the preservation of animals while being transported from distant parts of the world. Since then chemistry has added largely to our means for such purposes, such as chloride of zinc, arsenic, salt and nitre, hyposulphite of soda, acetate of aluminum, and other means for special purposes. In Berlin, Heidelberg, Vienna, etc., alcohol is used where a prolonged dissection is necessary; but for the ordinary dissections of students nothing whatever is used. The greater number of unclaimed bodies, arising from overcrowding, poverty, and want, so amply supplies the anatomical schools that they dissect without any antiseptic, and remove the subjects the moment decomposition sets in. In Vienna no part is allowed to remain on the tables more than seven days. But while such an arrangement would be disastrous here, it works well there by reason of their different mode of study. The dissecting-rooms are only open from twelve noon to seven P.M., and from October to April; and during the first two years the student does little beyond dissection and the study of anatomy.

In this country, where the supply of material never equals the demand, especially in the winter, we are compelled to preserve them for months. The chloride of zinc and arsenic are the favorite means.* *

By such a hasty review as I have now given of the imperfect methods, the meagre advantages, and the restricted opportunities for the cultivation of practical anatomy by former students of medicine, we can appreciate how vastly better

* For some researches of my own with a new preservative-hydrate of chloral-see the Philadelphia Medical Times, March 21, 1874, On the Anatomical, Pathological, and Surgical Uses of Chloral. My subsequent experiments have fully borne out the conclusions there stated. They will be given at length in a subsequent paper (Amer. Jour. Med. Sci., July, 1875).

In the N. Y. Med. Record, Jan. 9, 1897, p. 48, I have shown that hyaline and granular casts and epithelial cells were preserved in the urine by chloral for nearly twenty years.—(W. W. K., 1905.)

off we of to-day are from every point of view. The good old times are the myths of croakers with which they would repress the progressive spirit of the present. Never has anatomy made so rapid and so substantial progress as in the present century, and never has it in this country attained such a point as it occupies to-day. Yet we lack much. Our very wealth of opportunities threatens us with a Capuan repose, unless the stirring examples of the great men who have preceded us stimulate us to exertion. Tertullian says that Herophilus, in Alexandria, dissected over six hundred bodies.* Berengarius of Carpi, the contemporary of Vesalius, dissected over one hundred.† Haller, who died a century ago, says that with his own hand he had dissected over four hundred in seventeen years; and that almost unequalled worker, John Hunter, when asked at the trial of Captain Donellan, in 1781, whether he had not dissected more than any other man in Europe, replied, "In the last thirty-three years I have dissected some thousands of bodies."§ It seems an exaggeration; but remember his habits. For thirty years his working-day consisted of nineteen to twenty hours. He rose at four or five o'clock, and always dissected till his breakfast hour, at nine, and after his labors in practice and the hospital-wards were over, his labors in the dissecting-room recommenced, and he never left it till midnight or even later. When any of you, then, visit the Hunterian Museum, in London, remember what it cost him in money, and, what is more, the unceasing labor of a long life. Such diligence has sometimes, alas! cost the world more than money or toil. It cost the life of Bichat, who died at barely thirty-one from constant confinement in his dissecting-rooms. "Bichat," wrote Corvisart to the First Consul, "has just died on a field of

*Encyc. Brit., vol. ii, p. 751. Wm. Hunter, Introd. Lect. p. 19. † Bayle et Thillaye, op. cit., vol. i, p. 244.

Encyc. Brit. 8th ed., vol. ii, p. 715.

§ Life, vol. i, p. 134.

battle that counts more than one victim. No man in so short a time has done so much and so well."*

Joining diligent work to the unequalled opportunities that we now have, the laborers in the vast field of medicine, in whatever department they toil, will meet with a reward never before equalled. The future opens to the active worker the brightest prospects. Happy will he be who knows how to avail himself of its advantages!

*Bichat, Sur la Vie et la Mort, p. xiv.