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Updated: May 12, 2025
An important fact about animal smells is that many which we might be inclined to attribute to the animal which diffuses them, are really due to the fermentative or putrefactive action of bacteria which swarm on the skin and in the intestines of animals.
But such mechanical means has not been devised, and at present a putrefactive fermentation appears to be the only practical method of separating the fibres. Sponges. A somewhat similar use is made of bacteria in the commercial preparation of sponges. The sponge of commerce is simply the fibrous skeleton of a marine animal.
I expected to see them putrefying, running into sanies, like corpses left to rot in the open air. On the contrary, the birds have dried and hardened, without undergoing any change. What did they want for their putrefaction? Simply the intervention of the fly. The maggot, therefore, is the primary cause of dissolution after death; it is, above all, the putrefactive chemist.
With an accurate training as a chemist, having been diverted in his studies upon fermentation into the realm of biology, and nourishing a strong conviction of the identity between putrefactive changes of the body and fermentation, Pasteur was well prepared to undertake investigations which had hitherto been confined to physicians alone.
It is true that on the whole more varieties of vegetable food can be kept dry and ready for use by softening with hot water than is the case with foods prepared from animals. This is only a question of not keeping food too long or in conditions tending to the access of putrefactive bacteria.
Now, in the case of those who die from accident or violence, with their muscles in a good state of nutrition, the muscular irritability continues long after death, rigidity sets in late, and persists long without the putrefactive change. On the contrary, in cases of disease in which nutrition has been diminished for a long time before death, all these effects are reversed.
At any rate, in all the bodies of the Martians that were examined after the war, no bacteria except those already known as terrestrial species were found. That they did not bury any of their dead, and the reckless slaughter they perpetrated, point also to an entire ignorance of the putrefactive process. But probable as this seems, it is by no means a proven conclusion.
A growing number of observations was accumulating, pointing toward a probable causal connection between fermentative and putrefactive processes and the growth of microscopic organisms; but these observations were known only to a few, and were ignored by the majority of scientists.
This is the most reasonable cause, for the fecal matter in health is toxic and it only requires one step further to sufficiently intensify the putrefactive change to create irritation of the mucous membrane. Of course there is a degree of immunization taking place all the time. Many people have themselves inured to the constant saturation of fecal intoxication.
Retardation of the putrefactive process has been noticed in bodies some years under water. Konig of Hermannstadt mentions a man who, forty years previous to the time of report, had fallen under the waters of Echoschacht, and who was found in a complete state of preservation. Postmortem Growth of Hair and Nails. The hair and beard may grow after death, and even change color.
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