en
burned to charcoal without awaking. Drunkenness or great exhaustion may
also explain certain cases. In substantiation of the possibility of
Taylor's instances several prominent physiologists have remarked that
persons have endured severe burns during sleep and have never wakened.
There is an account of a man who lay down on the top of a lime kiln,
which was fired during his sleep, and one leg was burned entirely off
without awaking the man, a fact explained by the very slow and gradual
increase of temperature.

The theories advanced by the advocates of spontaneous human combustion
are very ingenious and deserve mention here. An old authority has said:
"Our blood is of such a nature, as also our lymph and bile: all of
which, when dried by art, flame like spirit of wine at the approach of
the least fire and burn away to ashes." Lord Bacon mentions spontaneous
combustion, and Marcellus Donatus says that in the time of Godefroy of
Bouillon there were people of a certain locality who supposed
themselves to have been burning of an invisible fire in their entrails,
and he adds that some cut off a hand or a foot when the burning began,
that it should go no further. What may have been the malady with which
these people suffered must be a matter of conjecture.

Overton, in a paper on this subject, remarks that in the "Memoirs of
the Royal Society of Paris," 1751, there is related an account of a
butcher who, opening a diseased beef, was burned by a flame which
issued from the maw of the animal; there was first an explosion which
rose to a height of five feet and continued to blaze several minutes
with a highly offensive odor. Morton saw a flame emanate from beneath
the skin of a hog at the instant of making an incision through it.
Ruysch, the famous Dutch physician, remarks that he introduced a hollow
bougie into a woman's stomach he had just opened, and he observed a
vapor issuing from the mouth of the tube, and this lit on contact with
the atmosphere. This is probably an exaggeration of the properties of
the hydrogen sulphid found in the stomach. There is an account of a man
of forty-three, a gross feeder, who was particularly fond of fats and a
victim of psoriasis palmaria, who on going to bed one night, after
extinguishing the light in the room, was surprised to find himself
enveloped in a phosphorescent halo; this continued for several days and
recurred after further indiscretions in diet. It is well known that
there ar