Whilst man agitates and torments himself in employing all his activity to produce a feeble result, nature, all-powerful, by means of simple causes, produces wonderful effects. Man disputes with the rivers, the ocean’s waves, some few acres of land, which he protects with great labour from their overwhelming influences. At the voice of nature, elements, until now foreign to each other, approximate, combine, and unite in the bosom of the earth, and suddenly throw up from the middle of the ocean vast isles and new continents. He has need of all his industry to make the sap circulate in a few etiolated plants; she, on the contrary, confers life and motion to all beings, or strikes them with torpor or death, according as she elevates or depresses the sun a few degrees in the horizon.

In order to preserve the bodies of his own image, man, stimulated by sentiments of religion, respect, or of love, mutilates in vain their inanimate spoils; in vain he penetrates with aromatics and preservative juices, remains, which putrefaction reclaims and seizes. Nature covers with a little snow the traveller who scales the mountain, then, after centuries, returns the body unaltered. She commands the winds to blow: the sands of the desert are agitated, and the soldiers of Cambyses, and the soldiers of Alexander, are dried in the dust; penetrating with some unknown bodies the entrails of the earth, she there preserves the generations which have preceded us.

Here is the art of embalming in its highest degree of perfection; here are mummies which we ought to desire to imitate. It must be acknowledged, that when the Egyptians and the Guanches transmitted to us their bodies in a state of preservation, which has been the admiration and astonishment of ages, they owed as much, at least, to the aid of nature, as to the perfection of their art, and the development of their industry. If, then, we wish to preserve the bodies of those who excited our admiration or our love, in place of despising the mummies4 which nature presents us with, let us study them, let us seek with care, the cause of their preservation, and, by reasonable analyses, let us endeavour to penetrate the secret of her ways.

If this direction had been followed, convenient processes would doubtless have been discovered a long time ago; and it never would have been supposed possible to preserve a corpse with certainty, by stuffing it with sixty or eighty kinds of powdered aromatics. After such considerations, we, who have substituted an experimental for an empyrical method, and progressed from the known to the unknown, ought, to be consistent, to study natural mummies first.

Some have been formed by the general qualities of the air and earth, others, by purely local influences; in the first series, we include the mummy of the sand, and those of avalanches; in the second, those discovered here and there in certain sepultures; in the convent of the Capuchins, near Palermo; in the caves of St. Michel, at Bordeaux; in the cemetery of the church of Saint Nicholas; the Museum; the cloister of the Carmes; the caves of the Jacobins and the Cordeliers, at Toulouse, &c.

These last named mummies, the preservation of which is probably due to the particular properties of the soil in which they were deposited, have been, up to the present day, objects of vulgar curiosity, rather than of attentive examination.

Drs. Boucherie, Bermont, and Gaubert, have favoured me with some notes taken during a visit to the caves of St. Michel, at Bordeaux, (August, 1837.) I let them speak for themselves:

“The bodies exposed to view at Bordeaux, in the cavern situated beneath the tower of Saint Michel, were deposited there in 1793, nearly in the same state in which they appear at present, they came from the sepulchres of the church and the adjoining cemetery. A great number of bones, and the wreck of soft parts, dried and preserved like the whole bodies, form a layer of seventeen or eighteen feet, upon which are supported the inferior extremities of seventy subjects, arranged in a circle around the wall, and retained in a vertical position by the cords which bind them. Some of these, they say, had remained in the earth many centuries, others from sixty to eighty years or more.

“During our visit, 25th August, 1837, we determined to examine with care the state of these bodies, those of the middle, where they had remained for more than forty years, and above all, we procured strips of skin and muscle, in order to examine them at leisure, and to submit them to some chemical re-agent, which might reveal to us the presence of the preservative element. We could not hope to collect any of the earth that had originally covered them, since they were superposed on remnants thrown into this place at the time they were enclosed here.

“After having furnished ourselves with a thermometer at 24°R., and a hygrometer at 34°, both in the open air, we descended thirty or forty steps, which conducted us to the cave. The coolness did not appear to us very striking, as it commonly is at this depth during the heat of the dog-star. Placing our instruments on the soil, we proceeded to examine the bodies.

“It is an extraordinary aspect, by lamp-light, offered by this circular space, the walls of which are tapistried by dead bodies all standing erect; the eye wanders from one to the other involuntarily, and we view the whole before confining ourselves to details. Although the most of them are in the attitude of the buried dead, some differences in size, in the position and expression of the physiognomy, produce a strange and confused impression. There is one point, however, where our regards were particularly attracted, where the heart is chilled and troubled with deep emotion—here is beheld a miserable creature in a position violently contracted—the mouth open and horribly contracted, the inferior members strongly drawn to the body—the arms, one twisted by convulsions is thrown over the head, the other folded beneath the trunk, and fixed to the thigh by the nails, which are deeply implanted in the flesh; the forced inflexion of the whole body, gives the expression of ineffable pain, all announcing a violent death. Unfortunate wretch! had he died in this state, or rather, had he been buried alive, and assumed this position in the horrible agonies of awakening?

“The skin of all these mummies, of a more or less deep gray colour, dried and rather soft to the touch, gives the sensation of parchment slightly stretched upon the organs, dried, and of the consistence of amadou[F] or spunk; the articulations are stiff and inflexible; the chest, the abdomen, and the cranium, examined carefully, did not show any incision, any regular opening indicative of any trace of embalming, even the most imperfect. The different features of the face, still distinct among some of them, displayed a variety of physiognomy; two or three of them displayed the hair of the beard very well preserved, the teeth were healthy and covered with brilliant enamel. The upper and lower extremities entirely dried, and whole in many of the subjects, are provided with all the phalanges; the last, however, divested of its nail. On the body of the tallest figure is perceived enormous purses, with evident traces of a double scrotal hernia. The skin raised and viewed on its interior surface, is tanned like the exterior; all traces of cellular tissue has disappeared; the muscles, separated from the skin, have the colour and consistence, and almost the internal structure of amadou. On introducing the hand into the chest, some rudiment of lung was found, a net work very similar to that of leaves deprived of their fleshy part; they might be taken for a mass of leaves dissected by the caterpillars, and rendered adherent by the threads and viscous fluid that these insects deposit. The intestines, also dried, are nearly in the same state.

“Such are the principal details which presented themselves in the course of our examination: at first sight, it appeared astonishing that these bodies, removed for more than forty years from the medium in which they were desiccated, should have experienced no sensible alteration in a cavern situated deeply under the earth, and surmounted by a structure like that of the tower of St. Michel. Let us return to our instruments, perhaps they will aid us in the explanation of the fact. After remaining an hour in this atmosphere, the thermometer passed from 24° to 18°, and the hygrometer, from 34° to 42°, which gives a difference for the first, of 6°, for the second of 8°, a very trifling difference, when compared to that of caves and other places in the same apparent position. This thermometrical and hygrometrical state of the air, always invariable, is, without doubt, one of the principal circumstances in maintaining the integrity of these mummies. To what cause, further, can be attributed this double state of the air in the cavern? A slow fermentation, movements of latent decomposition in the enormous mass of animal remains which form the bottom of this receptacle, are they not the probable cause? We think so, and we leave with confidence this idea, to the meditation of philosophers. Our end was attained, we had proved facts, and collected some parcels of the remains to subject them to analysis; after different trials without result, some portions of skin and muscular tissue, placed in weakened hydrochloric acid, and treated by ebullition, were totally dissolved in this liquid, to which they communicated a deep brown colour. This liquor filtered and treated by the yellow cyanate of potash, yielded a very abundant blue precipitate; and the presence of iron was thus indicated, from whence we thought that the preservation of these bodies was owing to the presence of a compound of iron in the earth, where they had been deposited. But the human blood yields iron also; was it a portion of this element of our tissues that our experiments brought into play? A suit of comparative experiments upon the tissues of mummies, on the one hand, and of the same tissues dried in the sun of subjects recently dead, on the other hand, have evidently proved the excess of iron in the first. Analogous circumstances doubtless, have determined the preservation of the bodies found at Toulouse, at Palermo, &c. We regret not to be able to transmit the suit of experiments made by our learned friend, Dr. Boucherie; these will form the subject of ulterior researches.”

The same phenomenon still occurs in different parts of our country, under a moderate temperature: thus, about 1660, M. de La VisÈe and his domestic, having been assassinated at Paris, and interred on the place where the crime was committed, their bodies were discovered after the lapse of a year, whole and readily recognisable; a cloak even, lined with plush, had not suffered the least alteration.

The mummy of the avalanches, and all those, the preservation of which is due to a constant low temperature, retain the freshness and plumpness of the tissues for years and for centuries, if the conditions of the medium remain the same; but, under these circumstances, the action of cold exerts no other influence than the suspension of decomposition; for the moment it ceases, the tissues are rapidly exposed to the laws of inorganic chemistry.

In those cases, however, where the bodies exposed to cold are subjected to a dry and lively wind, a real mummification may occur, as in the following example:

There is upon the summit of the Great Saint Bernard, a sort of morgue (dead house) in which have been deposited, from time immemorial, the bodies of those unfortunate persons who have perished upon this mountain by cold, or the fall of avalanches.

The study of the circumstances of locality, and of temperature, in which this establishment is placed, may, to a certain degree, indicate the most favourable conditions for the long preservation of bodies. Here they show to travellers, bodies, which they assert have been sufficiently well preserved to be recognisable after the lapse of two or three years. A physician, whose quality as ancient prosector of the faculty of Medicine of Paris, rendered him curious to visit this part of the hospital in all its details, has verified with his own eyes all that travellers have written, and has transmitted to us the following observation:

The hospital of Saint Bernard, is, as is well known, the most elevated habitation in Europe, being 7,200 feet above the level of the sea. The temperature of this part of the globe is always very low, rarely above zero, even during summer. This extensive establishment is built upon the borders of a little lake, at the bottom of a little gorge; the principal mass of the building represents a long parallelogram placed in the direction of the gorge, so that its two principal faces, pierced with numerous windows, are sheltered from the wind by the rocks; whilst the two extremities, on the contrary, are exposed to all the violence of those which blow from one side of the gorge to the other. About fifty steps beyond this principal building, and a little out of a right line with it, is situated the morgue, a sort of square chamber, the walls of which, three or four feet thick, are constructed of good stone, and the arched roof of which is very solid. Two windows of about four feet square, are pierced in the direction of the breadth of the valley, directly facing each other, so that a perpetual current of cool air traverses the interior of the chamber. There is, further, but a single table in this morgue, upon which they place the bodies when first introduced; after a while they are arranged around the walls in an upright attitude. At the time of my passage of the Great Saint Bernard, (31st August, 1837,) there were several of these mummified bodies along the walls of the chamber, but a greater number were entirely divested of flesh, and lie scattered about the earthy floor of the room. They informed me, that decomposition only took place when the bodies fell by accident to the ground; which was owing to the humidity occasioned by the snow, which occasionally entered with the currents of air through the windows of the morgue.[G] (Note communicated by Dr. Lenoir.)

The existence of the mummies of the sands, is attested by numerous travellers, and all the authors who have written on embalming mention them. They are every where found, where an arid and burning atmosphere deeply penetrates the masses of fine sand, easily agitated by the winds. In Egypt, for example, Herodotus frequently speaks of these bodies dried by the sun. Cambyses, on the authority of this author, suffered horrible effects from these sands, driven before the wind; he lost almost his whole army during his expedition to the temple of Jupiter Ammon.

Pere Kircher gives us an interesting description of these sand storms: “In the countries of Africa situated beyond the Nile, is a vast desert of sand, the immense waves of which appear in the boundless horizon like those of the sea. Agitated by the winds, these sands produce such frightful tempests, that they swallow up under their enormous masses, travellers, beasts of burden, and merchandise. Bodies thus engulfed, become desiccated after a series of years, both by the ardour of the sun’s rays, and by virtue of the burning sand: this is the reason that some have asserted that mummies might be formed by natural causes only, &c.”[H] Penicher, Clauderus, De Maillet, Rouelle Le Comte de Caylus, cite examples of the same nature. A whole caravan, or some travellers, disappear under a mass of sand; years, centuries, pass by, then a new revolution in the disposition of these masses restores to the light of day, those bodies which a previous revolution had engulfed; blackened, dried, and lightened by the loss of all their fluids. In Mexico, Mr. Humboldt met with true mummies. Travellers have visited battlefields, situated on a soil deprived of rain, and in a burning atmosphere. They saw with astonishment, that these fields were covered with the dead bodies of Spaniards and Peruvians, dried and preserved for a long time. At the side of these phenomena which nature offers us, come the mummies of which Maillet speaks in his letters on Egypt.

“There has been discovered,” says he, “recently, in this plain of mummies, a mode of burying hitherto unknown. At the extremity of this vast open country, and towards the mountains, which bound it on the west, have been discovered beds of carbon, on which are laid bodies clothed only with some linen, and covered with a mat, upon which rests the sands seven or eight feet in thickness. Nevertheless, it is to be observed, that these bodies, although they were not embalmed, or at least but slightly so, the same as those that they have neglected to enclose in cases, were none the less beyond the reach of corruption.”

I promised to demonstrate the simple connection which exists between the products of nature, and those of human industry, to show that the first were the origin of the second. The facts which I have just exposed, I think, place this proposition beyond a doubt.

The preservation of bodies among the Guanches, which is already a step advanced in the art, will form the subject of the following chapter.