An old book says, if you anoint your hands with two ounces of bol armenian, one ounce of quicksilver, half an ounce of camphor, and two ounces of brandy (well mixed together), it seems that you may steep them in a pot of boiling lead. If you prepare yourself with liquid storax (a juice produced from a tree called casper bauhine in Italy and elsewhere), you may enter fire—eat fire—have a coal put on your tongue—or, finally, swallow boiling oil (!). This storax also enables you to undergo baking in an oven: and as for taking poisons, the author says it is easy enough, if you take an antidote afterwards.
To handle boiling lead, no preparation is required, as the perspiration generated by the heat forms a coating of steam on the skin, impermeable to the metal, which feels like liquid velvet.
In the writer’s youth, before he ever thought of parading his acquirements, he remembers being one of a party of boys around a caldron of molten lead, used to solder gas-pipes in the street, all of us scrambling in the pot for coppers which a practical joker dropped in. The jest was most amusing when a penny had remained some time on the surface of the dross, and was thoughtlessly put into the cold hand to be transferred to the pocket.
Nevertheless it is a feat which had better be witnessed than performed by oneself.
As for dry heat, men have borne it up to 300 deg. Fahrenheit. The writer has been in the inner drying-rooms of an oil-silk factory where the workmen put their tea and coffee to boil, and experienced no ill effects, though a knife could not be touched without a disagreeable sensation.
To put a coal on the tongue, the skin is prepared, and must be thoroughly calloused, which no amateur would for a moment think of doing.
DIFFERENT TEMPERATURE OF WATER IN THE SAME VESSEL.
With a mixture of size and lamp-black paint half the outside of a tin pot. Fill with boiling water, when, by trial with a thermometer, or your finger if you are hardened, the water will be found to cool more quickly on the blackened than on the polished side.