The kidnies, injected with this salt, and immersed in the milk of lime, became hardened at the surface and putrefied in the interior.
After this first part of the experiments of M. Gannal, it results that the aluminous salts are those alone which succeed well in preserving animal matters, and which may be used advantageously.
Alum, employed alone, preserves well, but for a short time; this salt, slightly soluble in cold water, (fifteen degrees,) will not suffice as an injection for the preservation of a body; it is indispensable to immerse the body in a bath of the same salt.
The mixture of alum, salt, and nitre, as indicated in the provisionary report, has not the same inconvenience; a subject injected with this liquid, at ten or twelve degrees of density, may be preserved for more than a month; but it is indispensable to immerse it, at least from time to time, when it is desirable to prolong its preservation; that is to say, for the entire winter; but at a temperature above fifteen degrees, it is necessary to inject the liquid at a density of twenty-five or thirty degrees, and, in order to obtain it, it requires to be heated at least to forty degrees.
Several bodies injected with this liquid at ten degrees, on the 2d of December, 1834, were well preserved until the end of April; other subjects, injected on the 7th of August, but with the liquid at twenty-five degrees of density, and at ten degrees of the thermometer, were still, on the 10th of December, in good condition, whilst those that were injected with a liquor of inferior density, did not resist a temperature of twenty or twenty-five degrees, although they were immersed in a bath denoting fifteen degrees. The bath of salted liquid has, independently of the inconvenience of expense for the necessary salts and the embarrassment of the tubes, which require frequent renewal, the objection of hardening the skin, considerably.
On these motives new efforts have been made, which have conducted to the following results: to demonstrate that all the salts with a soluble aluminous base, are decomposed; that those which are very soluble offer all the advantages of alum employed in very concentrated solution, and have not the same inconveniences.