Jews and Eastern nations generally did; and some of them might even have had a knowledge of the antiseptic preparations used by the Egyptians. They never prepared the dead as mummies, but they may at times have put some antiseptic ingredient into the blood, tending by its chemical action somehow to retard the escape of the water and the decomposition of the mass. If this were really done or not, we believe modern science cannot decide; and the historical evidence is not clear.
Something may be due, also, to the mode in which they would sometimes close a narrow-necked vessel of glass. When it had received its contents, the glass of the neck would be heated, probably by the flame of a blowpipe, until it became soft and pliable. The sides would then be pressed together until they coalesced and became united, thus obliterating the orifice; or else molten glass would be carefully dropped on the lips of the mouth, until the whole was entirely coated over and perfectly closed. When either was followed and the work was done perfectly, the ampulla would be, in fact, hermetically sealed. The air would thus be excluded, and evaporation nearly arrested. Placed in a loculus or grave in the dry earth of the catacombs, twenty-five or thirty-five feet beneath the surface of the earth, the ampulla would also be subjected to an ever-equable temperature of about 58° Fahr. Under such circumstances, especially if we admit the presence of some antiseptic ingredient, it may be possible that decomposition would be very slow. But, after all, the glass sides of these ampullæ are thin, and glass is porous, and sixteen centuries is a very long time. Even were the sides far thicker than they are, evaporation would have slowly taken place, the gaseous products of
decomposition would have gradually passed through into the outer atmosphere, and only the dry solid residuum would be left, as we ordinarily find it in the ampullæ from the catacombs. The case of the ampulla containing the blood of St. Januarius is not open to these doubts. We are not able to say, indeed, whether it was actually closed in either of the modes we have indicated. As it stands in the present reliquary, of which we have given an account, the mouth enters so deeply into the upper mass of soldering within the case that the eye cannot discover the manner of closure. Before it was placed in this reliquary, five hundred and seventy or seven hundred and thirty years ago, this could probably have been seen; but we have found no record throwing light on the subject. We presume it was done in one or the other of the modes we have described. It is certainly so tightly closed that not a drop of the liquid blood within has ever been known to ooze out.
But this ampulla has not been lying in the low and equable temperature of an underground vault of the catacombs. It has been preserved in the upper and variable atmosphere of a city, subject for many centuries to the excessive heats of almost tropical summers, and to the cold winds that blow down at times from mountains covered with snow. By no law of physics could a mass of blood so
situated escape the natural consequence—a vast diminution of bulk by the loss of water and the escape of gases. The film that coats the interior of the smaller ampulla seen in the same case or reliquary, so like the film seen in the whole and in the broken ampullæ of the catacombs and churches generally, shows, we think, what would have been the natural course.
That the larger ampulla should, on the contrary, have lost nothing in the volume of its contents—that it should still be four-fifths filled, although for centuries exposed, as we have said, to heat and cold—that this general permanence of bulk and of character should be maintained, although eighteen or twenty times a year the mass alternates from a solid to a fluid condition, and passes through many subordinate changes of color and volume—these facts seem to us not only utterly inexplicable, but directly contrary to all we know of physical laws. We place them along side the grand fact of the liquefaction itself, as being in some measure its characteristic concomitants. Still, should any one deem these questions too obscure to be peremptorily decided, we shall not now discuss them. We are quite willing to let them stand or fall with the more prominent and important and more tangible question of the liquefaction itself. Of that we shall now proceed to treat.
TO BE CONTINUED.