Popular Lectures on Zoonomia: Or The Laws of Animal Life, in Health and DiseaseGarnett, Thomas
Science
Popular Lectures on Zoonomia: Or The Laws of Animal Life, in Health and Disease
Garnett, Thomas
Physiology
The alterations of temperature which the human body has been known to
bear, without any fatal or even bad effects, are not less than 400
degrees or 500 degrees of Fahrenheit. The natural heat of the human
body is 96 degrees or 97 degrees. In the West Indies, the heat of the
atmosphere is often 98 degrees or 99 degrees, and sometimes rises
even to 126 degrees, or 30 degrees above the temperature of the human
body, notwithstanding which, a thermometer put in the mouth points to
96 degrees or 97 degrees. The inhabitants of the hot regions of
Surinam support, without inconvenience, the heat of their climate. We
are assured that in Senegal, about the latitude of 17 degrees, the
thermometer in the shade generally stands at 108 degrees, without any
fatal effects to men or animals. The Russians often live in places
heated by stoves to 108 degrees or 109 degrees, and some philosophers
in this country, by way of experiment, remained a considerable time
in a room heated above the boiling point of water.
On the other hand, an equal excess of cold seems to have no greater
effect in altering the degree of heat proper to animal bodies.
Delisle has observed a cold in Siberia 70 degrees below the zero of
Fahrenheit's scale, notwithstanding which animals lived. Gmelin has
seen the inhabitants of Jeniseisk under the 58th degree of northern
latitude, sustaining a degree of cold, which in January became so
severe, that the spirit in the thermometer was 126 degrees below the
freezing point. Professor Pallas in Siberia, and our countrymen at
Hudson's Bay, have experienced a degree of cold almost equal to this.
All these facts tend to prove, that the heat of animals continues
without alteration in very different temperatures. Hence it is
evident that they must be able to produce a greater degree of heat,
when surrounded by a cold medium; and on the contrary, that they must
effect a diminution of the heat, when the surrounding medium is very
hot.
All these circumstances may be accounted for, by the principles we
have laid down; the decomposition of oxygen in the lungs.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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