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This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1841 Excerpt:...ones are generally employed, both as being stronger and admitting of a more uniform and higher polish. The bones of animals belonging to the same general class of nature are commonly observed to have certain points of general resemblance, by which they may be distinguished from one another, and are applied by man to various uses corresponding with such differences. Thus, the bones of fishes are softer, more flexible, and contain a much larger proportion of jelly and membrane, or, which comes to the same thing, a much smaller proportion of earthy matter, than those of the mammalia or warm-blooded quadrupeds; and the bones of these latter, comparatively dense and hard as they are, fall considerably short in density and hardness of the bones of birds, which, however, are generally too small and thin to be applied to much use in the arts. Bone undergoes, much more slowly than the soft parts of animals do, the process of spontaneous decomposition; meaning, by this term, that disintegration of a compound which takes place either by the chemical re-action of its ingredients on one another, or by means of air, moisture, and common temperatures. The bones of a human body buried in a church-yard are, perhaps, mostly consumed in twenty or thirty years; yet under favourable circumstances they will endure for a much longer time with but little change. Thus, in the charnel-house at Morat in Switzerland, there still remain many bones of the soldiers of Charles the Bold's army, who perished there in 143S, being 401 years ago. When Sir Christopher Wren was rebuilding St. Paul's Church after the great fire of London, the workmen in digging for the foundations came to the floor of a Roman temple, dedicated to the goddess Diana, on which were the horns of stags and Vol. I, 3rd...