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.
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