By warm water we are to understand boiling water, as is obvious from the copious steam arising from the vessel represented in pieces of statuary in such instances: as also from the Sixth Book of Virgil’s “Æneid”--“Some of the companions of Æneas, with boiling water taken from brazen vessels, wash the dead body, and then anoint it.” The Romans, as Lanzoni informs us, kept the bodies of the dead seven days before they interred them; and Servius, in his commentary on Virgil, tells us “that on the eighth day they burned the body, and on the ninth put its ashes in the grave.” Polydorus and Alexander ab Alexandro are also of opinion that the Romans kept the dead seven days; and Gierus affirms that they sometimes did not bury them till the ninth; but it is easy to believe that they deviated from the most universal custom when evident and incontestable marks of death rendered it safe to inter before the usual time. Alexander ab Alexandro also observes that it was customary among the Greeks to keep the bodies of their dead seven days before they put them on the funeral pile. It would have, perhaps, been sufficient to have kept the bodies of the dead seven days, or nine, or till putrefaction evinced the certainty of death; but the Romans carried their circumspection farther, since, to use the words of Quenstedt, “Those who were employed in watching the dead now and then began their conclamations, and all at once called the dead person aloud by his name, because, as Celsus informs us, the principle of life is often thought to have left the body when it still remains in it; for which reason conclamations were made, in order, if possible, to rouse it and excite it.” If our senses are so imperfect that the signs of life may escape them; if the languid state of the sensitive powers, or the origin of the nerves, is such that the most painful chirurgical operations are sometimes insufficient to put the spirits in motion; if the duration of a perfect insensibility for a considerable number of days is a precarious and uncertain mark of death; and if situations, apparently the most inconsistent with life, for a considerable time amount only to strong presumptions that life is destroyed, we ought, with Mr. Winslow and a great many other celebrated authors, to conclude that a beginning of putrefaction is the only certain sign of death. Mr. Winslow evidently proves that the most cruel chirurgical operations are sometimes insufficient to ascertain death. From these observations we can but conclude--(1) That it is to no purpose to use the most cruel chirurgical operations; and (2) that it is necessary to abstain from such as may prove mortal to the patient. Mr. Winslow is indeed so far from recommending operations of the last mentioned kind, that he calls it rash to plunge a long needle under the nail of an apoplectic patient’s toe.