are to undress him, for I had
noticed that animals desiccated directly in contact with the air, died
oftener than those which remained covered with moss and other soft
materials, during the ordeal of desiccation.

My great air-pump, with its immense platform, its enormous oval
wrought-iron receiver, which a rope running on a pulley firmly fixed in
the ceiling easily raised and lowered by means of a windlass--all these
thousand and one contrivances which I had so laboriously prepared in
spite of the railleries of those who envied me, and which I felt
desolate at seeing unemployed, were going to find their use! Unexpected
circumstances had arisen at last to procure me such a subject for
experiment, as I had in vain endeavored to procure, while I was
attempting to reduce to torpidity dogs, rabbits, sheep and other mammals
by the aid of freezing mixtures. Long ago, without doubt, would these
results have been attained if I had been aided by those who surrounded
me, instead of being made the butt of their railleries; if our
authorities had sustained me with their influence instead of treating me
as a subversive spirit.

I shut myself up _tete-a-tete_ with the Colonel, and took care that even
old Getchen, my housekeeper, now deceased, should not trouble me during
my work. I had substituted for the wearisome lever of the old fashioned
air-pumps, a wheel arranged with an eccentric which transformed the
circular movement of the axis into the rectilinear movement required by
the pistons: the wheel, the eccentric, the connecting rod, and the
joints of the apparatus all worked admirably, and enabled me to do
everything by myself. The cold did not impede the play of the machine,
and the lubricating oil was not gummed: I had refined it myself by a new
process founded on the then recent discoveries of the French _savant_ M.
Chevreul.

Having extended the body on the platform of the air-pump, lowered the
receiver and luted the rim, I undertook to submit it gradually to the
influence of a dry vacuum and cold. Capsules filled with chloride of
calcium were placed around the Colonel to absorb the water which should
evaporate from the body, and to promote the desiccation.

I certainly found myself in the best possible situation for subjecting
the human body to a process of gradual desiccation without sudden
interruption of the functions, or disorganization of the tissues or
fluids. Seldom had my experiments on rotifers and tardigrades b