Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 3.djvu/290

278 albuminoid matter which composes the muscular fibres, as the solidification of the blood results from coagulation of its fibrine. After a few hours the coagulated musculine grows fluid again, rigidity passes away, and the muscles relax. Something not dissimilar takes place also in the blood. The globules change, lose shape, and suffer the beginning of dissociation. The agents of putrefaction, vibrios and bacteria, thus enter upon their great work by insidiously breaking up the least seen parts.

At last, when partial revivals are no longer possible, when the last flicker of life has gone out and corpse-like rigidity has ceased, a new work begins. The living germs that had collected on the surface of the body and in the digestive canal develop, multiply, pierce into all the points of the organism, and produce in it a complete separation of the tissues and humors; this is putrefaction. The moment of its appearance varies with the causes of death and the degree of outward temperature. When death is the result of a putrid malady, putrefaction begins almost immediately when the body has grown cold. It is the same when the atmosphere is warm. In general, in our climates, the work of decomposition becomes evident after from thirty-eight to forty hours. Its first effects are noticeable on the skin of the stomach; this takes on a greenish discoloration, which soon spreads and covers successively the whole surface of the body. At the same time the moist parts, the eye, the inside of the mouth, soften and decay; then the cadaverous odor is gradually developed, at first faint and slightly fetid, a mouldy smell, then a pungent and ammoniacal stench. Little by little the flesh sinks in and grows watery; the organs cease to be distinguishable. Every thing is seized upon by what is termed putridity. If the tissues are examined under the microscope at this moment, we no longer recognize any of the anatomical elements of which the organic fabric is made up in its normal state. "Our flesh," Bossuet exclaims in his funeral-sermon on Henrietta of England, "soon changes its nature, our body takes another name; even that of a corpse, used because it still exhibits something of the human figure, does not long remain with it. It becomes a thing without a shape, which in every language is without a name." When structure has wholly disappeared, nothing more remains but a mixture of saline, fat, and proteic matters, which are either dissolved and carried away by water, or slowly burned up by the air's oxygen, and transmuted into new products, and the whole substance of the body, except the skeleton, returns piecemeal to the earth whence it came forth. Thus the ingredients of our organs, the chemical elements of our bodies, turn to mud and dust again. From this mud and this dust issue unceasingly new life and energetic activity; but a clay fit for the commonest uses may also be got from it, and, in the words of Shakespeare's Hamlet, the dust of Alexander or Caesar may plug the vent of a beer-cask, or "stop a hole to keep the wind away." These "base uses," of which the Prince of