IDENTITY OF BURNT REMAINS.
The medical jurist will no doubt find cremation a formidable barrier in elucidating the question of identity, although the entire destruction of a dead body is a matter of extreme difficulty.
In the case of calcination chemical analysis of the ash would detect the phosphate of lime, but this would throw no light upon the subject, since the ash of human bones and that of the lower animals is identical. If the burnt bone is entire, the state of the epiphyses may enlighten the question of the determination of age. The following two cases, in which fragments or portions of bone had been submitted to the action of fire, show how medical training and some knowledge of comparative anatomy may contribute to the establishment of guilt or may attest innocence.
In the case of The Queen vs. John Henry Wilson, for murder, the accused burnt his step-father in a lime-kiln for over a week, and on strewing ashes from the kiln fine fragments of bone picked up were afterward identified as human. At the trial identity rested on the fact of finding two buttons and a buckle, which were recognized as part of the deceased’s wearing apparel when last seen.
In the second case, that of a young woman supposed to be in the family way who should not have been, it was thought that she had been confined and made away with the infant. Under this supposition the premises where she lived were searched by the chief constable, who found in the stove some bones and fragments of bones that had been burnt. On examination by a qualified medical man, the fragments turned out to be not human bones, but those of some other animal, presumably those of a pig and of a chicken, which the family, who lived in a tenement-house without a back yard, had put in the stove to get rid of the refuse.[570]