Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 5.djvu/239

Rh magnesium, one product would be analogous (of course, not quite the same) to our magnesia alba of commerce. The formation of a mass of carbonate of calcium, not, however, possessing any degree of chemical purity worthy of mention, but sufficient for a specific mineralogical identification, and for the purpose of easy reduction to atoms by pulverization, deliquescence, or solution, would not be a difficult, expensive, or very tedious operation for the practical chemist. The reduction of the mass of carbonate of calcium into lime, and carbonic anhydride, would be a matter of the very easiest execution. It requires only heat to full redness in open vessels. In a current of air, or any gas, and especially of steam, the decomposition, or retrograde transition, takes place at a lower temperature. It requires no alteration of the principle in confining the process to the magnesium carbonates, or any other compound of carbon that may be mentioned. The hydrated carbonate, or ortho-carbonate, would differ from the carbonate less in principle than in the stage or point of extension of the process, and would be even more serviceable for one specific purpose, inasmuch as the product, at the ordinary temperature of the air, would crumble to a white powder, or, if quickly heated, would be converted into a pasty mass, which dries up to a powder. To effect this conversion of the body, which, at the outset of the operation, possesses the carbon element in sufficient abundance to be capable of almost any definite union under favorable circumstances, would require immersion in solutions which it would be easy to formulate and prepare, for any one under the inspiration of chemical experience and practical genius.

In a body weighing 154 pounds, not less than 110 pounds are water. Water, in any appreciable quantity, not becoming a constituent of our imagined necro-lithos, we see, at once, what an enormous reduction of bulk and actual weight the proposed process experiences. Therefore, no cognizance need be taken of the water of the body as a factor requiring special attention, its elimination being inevitable, and all the better, for it would have to be driven off by heat and evaporation, if it did not withdraw itself spontaneously. One of the peculiar features of the method is necessarily the spontaneous exclusion of the water—44 pounds of solid matter, then (in a body weighing 154 pounds), is exchanged for 44 pounds of calcareous stone of so non-compact a nature that it is peculiarly friable, peculiarly soluble, and wonderfully easy to dispose of. Carbon and water (or the elements of water), together with nitrogen, constitute about 98 per cent. of the whole weight of the human body. The nitrogen present weighs about 3$1/2$ pounds in 154, and to this is largely due the usual rapid decomposition. The suggested process of calcification would drive off nitrogen, together with about ten other very common chemical elements, existing in small quantities. The elements thus expelled rearrange themselves into ammonia, nitric acid, and other