Page:Houdini - Miracle Mongers.djvu/157

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MIRACLE-MONGERS AND THEIR METHODS
133

his side, Sir Charles Blagden found it cold like a corpse, and yet the heat of his body under his tongue was 98°. Hence they concluded that the human body possesses the power of destroying a certain degree of heat when communicated with a certain degree of quickness. This power, however, varies greatly in different media. The same person who experienced no inconvenience from air heated to 211°, could just bear rectified spirits of wine at 130°, cooling oil at 129°, cooling water at 123°, and cooling quicksilver at 118°. A familiar instance of this occurred in the heated room. All the pieces of metal there, even their watch-chains, felt so hot that they could scarcely bear to touch them for a moment, while the air from which the metal had derived all its heat was only unpleasant. M. Duhamel and Tillet observed, at Rochefoucault in France, that the girls who were accustomed to attend ovens in a bakehouse, were capable of enduring for ten minutes a temperature of 270°.

The same gentleman who performed the experiments above described ventured to expose themselves to still higher tempera-