published in the Philosophical Transactions for 1745, and in the Annual Register of 1763.

The case mentioned by Lecat has always been so much dwelt upon, by those who have debated this subject, that we will briefly state it here. The victim was a woman named Millet, who lived at Rheims, in 1725, in the same dwelling with Lecat. She was a drunken creature, and did not live happily with her husband, who seems to have been attached to her pretty serving-maid. On the 20th of April, 1725, the woman Millet was found near the fireplace, in the kitchen, entirely burned up, with the exception of the feet and some parts of the head and the vertebræ. A small portion of the flooring, beneath the body, seems to have been all else that was damaged by the fire. Millet was tried for the murder, and convicted; but a superior court reversed the sentence, on the supposition of the cause having been spontaneous combustion, and he married the pretty serving-maid, a circumstance that will always throw a doubt over our minds as to Mr. Millet's innocence. A number of other cases might be quoted; but to do so would be unnecessary, as they are all, mainly, alike. That of Bertholi, a friar, however, may be given in some detail. This man, says Dr. Apjohn, who lived at Mount Volere, went to the fair of Filetto, and, having walked about all day, retired, in the evening, to the house of a relation at Feuile, to spend the night. Upon his arrival, he went directly to his bedroom, and had a handkerchief placed between his shoulders, beneath his shirt. In a few minutes after, having been left alone, a singular noise, mingled with cries, was heard from his room; and when the people of the house rushed in, they found him on the floor, surrounded by a lambent flame, which retired as they approached. When visited the next morning by Joseph Battaglia, a surgeon of Ponte Basio, the integuments of the right arm were found loosened from the muscles and hanging down, and those of the back, between the shoulders and the thighs, were in the same condition. The account which the patient gave of his singular attack, was, that he felt a blow upon the right arm, as if inflicted by a club, and then saw a spark hanging to his shirt-sleeve, which immediately reduced it to ashes. The handkerchief already spoken of, as 38

VOL. LXXVII.

NO. 161.

also his drawers, were uninjured; but his nightcap was consumed, though his hair was not touched. He survived four days, in great suffering, and then died, leaving a case of perfect incomprehensibility to the world. Those who believe in spontaneous combustion ascribe it to electricity, and what not; others, again, are rather incredulous. The Baron de Liebig makes very merry over the fact of the nightcap being burned, and the hair on the head escaping scot-free. If it is admitted, says he, that the priest had his nightcap on his head, as is necessarily supposed by the narrator, (for if the cap had been burned upon a chair, the salvation of his locks would not be at all wonderful,) there is here but the effect of chance; we cannot suppose the nightcap was consumed by any such peculiar and unknown flame as is contended. Whatever might have been the condition of Bertholi's health, the nightcap did not participate in that condition. It was not sick; it possessed no preternatural susceptibility to spontaneous ignition; the same sort of fire that will consume a tress of hair would have consumed it. If the real truth of the matter could ever be shown, we apprehend that it would appear the priest was drunk-a natural enough conclusion to a day spent at a fair by an Italian friar, in those times and set fire to himself from a lamp which was in his chamber.

But the blue flame, that receded from the approach of strangers, and defied examination, is no bad emblem of many of these stories. It is impossible to put them to a satisfactory test; and most of them are disfigured by such suspicious circumstances as to naturally impel the mind to suspect other causes than that alleged to have produced the death. A man and his wife, in the lower classes, live unhappily together; they get drunk; they quarrel; the neighbors hear a struggle in their apartments, and the next morning her corpse is found, nearly burnt up; and this is a good case of spontaneous combustion. A drunken woman, with a lighted pipe in her mouth, seats herself at night before the fire, and the next day she affords a similar experience. Mr. O'Niel, keeper of the Five Pounds Almshouse in the city of Limerick, is awakened, at two o'clock in the morning, by one of the paupers, who complains that a fellow-lodger, in the

room above, has burned a hole through the ceiling and entered his apartment; and, on examination, Mrs. Peacock, "burning with fire and as red as copper," is found to have been the intruder; and the Methodist Magazine for 1809 (on the authority of which this tale is told) informs us that every observer, recalling the well-authenticated circumstance of her having recently been guilty of several derelictions from truth, was obliged to resolve so awful an event into "the visitation of God's judgment, in the punishment of a daring and persevering sinner!" To match this, we have the specific of holy water, which, after the failure of all other remedies, has been found in France an infallible cure in cases of spontaneous combustion, otherwise inextinguishable by all the waters of the ocean. But the most singular of all these cases, got up apparently to bolster a dubious theory, is a story, which appeared not long ago in one of the most respectable journals in the world, and was copied thence half over Europe. It contains, probably, just as much truth as many of the instances cited in the books on this subject, and may be repeated here as a specimen of the impostures the public are continually subjected to.

"A most extraordinary circumstance," (says the Journal des Debats, of February 24th, 1850,) "has recently transpired at a cabaret of the Barrière de l'Étoile at Paris. A man by the name of Xavier Ga journeyman painter, of grossly intemperate habits, being on a drinking bout with some of his boon companions, wagered that he would devour a lighted candle. Scarcely had he introduced the flaming wick into his mouth, when he gave a faint cry and sank upon the floor, amidst the amazement of the whole company. A bluish flame played upon his lips; his friends, seeking to succor him, were seized with horror on perceiving that the unhappy man was consuming within. In less than half an hour, his head and the upper part of his chest were completely carbonized. Two physicians were on the spot, and pronounced the case to be one of spontaneous combustion, a phenomenon well known to science, but not, as yet, susceptible of explanation."

A number of observations, upon the characteristics of this disorder, followed; but they need not be repeated here. The paragraph was, however, widely copied, and excited the attention of scientific men in various regions to such a degree,

that an investigation was set on foot by some curious gentlemen; and what, will it be guessed, was the result of their inquiries? Simply, that the whole story was false. Professor Regnault and M. Pelouze, the well-known chemist, having looked carefully into the matter, were utterly unable to discover the least trace either of the accident itself, or of the two medical men who stood by; and, to crown all, the notice of M. Carlier, the Préfet de Police, having been called to the story, he very soon traced the fable to its source, and publicly declared it to be a miserable imposture, without one solitary ground for credibility. No such man, no such circumstance, ever existed.

The murder of the Countess de Goerlitz, in 1849, by her domestic, and the man's attempt to divert suspicion from himself by causing it to appear that she was a victim to spontaneous combustion, produced an investigation which, while it resulted in his condemnation, gave a severe blow to the general belief in the disease itself. Many of the first men in their line in Germany,- Liebig, Bischoff, and others, decidedly ignore it, and protest that it should be erased from the rolls of respectable practitioners. Others, again, chiefly in France and England, adhere to the old faith. It is certain, however, that it is under a cloud just at present, and Mr. Dickens has had hard work in persuading some of his readers that Krooks is really and legitimately "done to death," and off the stage, with no chance of popping up into life again, like a Jack-in-the-box, utterly falsifying the verdict of the inquest and the sixfooter so generously furnished him by his administrator. Whether it will succeed in keeping its hold upon the faith of men, or whether, after being haled down from its high estate, and rudely buffeted between friends and foes in the contest, it may be sent, for a season, into exile, to be restored by the united voices of reason and experience, and come back upon us

Like a glory from afar,
Or a re-appearing star,

it is difficult to predict. We heartily wish the world were well rid of it; but it has possession, and that is nine points of the law. Still, we are convinced that, the more atten

tion is paid to the subject, the rarer will be its occurrence; and, if there be any truth at all in the numerous theories presented to us, it may be simplified into this: that, by an unnatural and excessive use of alcohol, the living human body may become susceptible of ignition and combustion to an extraordinary degree, in which case its unctuous particles will serve to feed the flames. But this can only be effected under peculiar circumstances, and by external aid. And for any thing beyond this point, we can find no support in physiology or elsewhere.

We must apologize for having dwelt so long upon a theme so unsatisfactory. It is not agreeable to reflect on the possibility of one's flaming out like a lime-kiln, as a necessary sequence to an unknown quantity of sherry or madeira. The philosophy of Captain Macheath's song in the Beggar's Opera,

"A man can die

Much bolder with brandy,"

is not a sound philosophy at all, in this view of the case. But the question arose so naturally, from the volumes under examination, and is, besides, one so novel to most readers, that we thought it well to devote a few pages to its elucidation.

Art. VI.1. Italian Irrigation: a Report on the Agricul tural Canals of Piedmont and Lombardy, addressed to the Honorable the Court of Directors of the East India Company. By R. BAIRD SMITH, F. G. S., Captain in the Army, and First Lieutenant of Engineers Bengal Presidency. Printed by Order. London and Edinburgh. 1852. 2 vols. 8vo. 2. The Calcutta Review, Vol. XII. July - December, 1849. Art. III. Canals of Irrigation in the N. W. Provinces. Calcutta, 1849. Svo.

3. Notes on the North Western Provinces of India. By CHARLES RAIKES, Magistrate and Collector of Mynpoorie. London. 1852. 8vo.

THE traveller in India, after passing the holy city of Be