Berry tells us in his Preface (p. vi) to The Registers of the Church of S. Michan, Dublin, 1907: “As is well-known the preservative qualities of the vaults under S. Michan’s Church are most remarkable, and decay in the bodies committed to them is strangely arrested. The latest writer on the subject (D. A. Chart, Story of Dublin) in a short notice of the Church, speaks of being struck (among others) “by a pathetic baby corpse, from whose plump wrists still hang the faded white ribbons of its funeral.” This coffin bears the date, 1679; yet the very finger and toe nails of the child are still distinct. The antiseptic qualities are believed to be largely attributable to the extreme dryness of the vaults and to the great freedom of their atmosphere from dust particles.”
It is generally admitted that the circumstances which attend the decomposition of the human body are very difficult in their manifold complications since atmosphere, situation with other accidents play so important and obscure a part, whence these laws are still very imperfectly understood owing to the immense practical difficulties, one might almost say the impossibility, of systematic investigation. Doctors A. C. Taylor and F. J. Smith in their Medical Jurisprudence[54] which is universally accepted as a standard and completely authoritative work, comment on these phenomena in very plain terms, frankly acknowledging the doubts and uncertainty that still envelop the whole question. “The action of the environment, the inherent potentialities of the microbes, and the state of their vitality at any moment involve such an enormous number of varying and variable factors that it becomes quite impossible to explain on a rational basis of ascertained fact … the extraordinary variations in the circumstances of putrefaction that have been observed.” And a little later the same authorities tell us that “sometimes one body has been found more decomposed after six or eight months burial than another which has lain interred for a period of eighteen months or two years.”[55] An eminent American medical expert, Dr. H. P. Loomis, says: “I have seen bodies buried two months that have shown fewer of the changes produced by putrefaction than others dead but a week.”[56]
The Greeks, as we have seen in some detail, generally regarded the fact that a body was found intact as a sign that the person
