The Romance of Modern Chemistry

HOW FIRE IS MADE lure a chemical change invariably becomes quicker and quicker, hence as the heat accumulates in the hay or the cotton waste, the chemical forces become more and more impetuous and ultimately lead to a general con- flagration. The affair, in fact, resembles the accumula- tion of money at compound interest. Haystacks are not the sort of thing that the ordinary individual can experiment with, but there is one very simple example of the way in which the heat effect accompanying a slow combustion may be accumulated. If iron filings are mixed with sawdust and a little water is added, then after a few hours steam will be seen to come off from the mixture. Now the heat evolved during rusting cannot be detected in ordinary circum- stances, but in this little experiment the non-conduct- ing sawdust allows the heat to accumulate until it is obvious to the senses. There was another kind of spontaneous combustion in which people believed at one time, namely, the spon- taneous combustion of human beings. It was supposed that a living human body might be consumed by fire spontaneously generated in the internal organs. In the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society for 1744, for example, one finds a communication to the following effect;“ About seventeen years ago, three noblemen, whose names for decency’s sake I will not publish, drank by emulation strong liquors, and two of them died, scorched and suffocated by a flame forcing itself from the stomach.” So widespread was the belief in the possible spontaneous combustion of human beings that the great chemist Liebig thought it worth while to deal with the question and to record his view that “ while a fat dead body charged with alcohol may perhaps burn, a living 129 i