After this service has been duly performed, the body must of course be committed to the grave; but should it not have been satisfactorily identified, the head ought to be preserved in spirits, in as natural a state as possible, that it may be recognised by the friends of the deceased. A curious instance stands on record, where this precaution led to the detection of the murderers. _Catherine Hayes_, and two accomplices, _Billings_ and _Wood_, murdered the husband of the former, cut off his head, and threw it into a dock near the Horseferry, Westminster. The head was in a few days found, and exposed on a pole in St. Margaret’s Church-yard, and afterwards preserved in spirits, by which means the face of the deceased was identified, and the perpetrators of the crime discovered, for which they were executed at Tyburn in the year 1726.
It will appear in the course of the present inquiry, that the anatomist may be called upon to examine a part, or the whole skeleton of a person supposed to have been murdered; and his evidence upon such occasions will be of the greatest importance. Convinced of this fact, we are induced to offer the following observations.
The stature of the human skeleton varies very considerably in different individuals; in the Museum of the College of Surgeons there is a male skeleton, the height of which is eight feet two inches; while we are informed by _Mr. Wilson_,[43] that he has seen a perfectly well formed skeleton of an adult person which measured only thirty-five inches; and a dwarf was lately exhibited in London of a still less stature; but in this latter case, the head was disproportionably large. There may have been some individuals a few inches taller, and others a few inches shorter than these, but we have no authentic records of the human stature exceeding nine, or at most, ten feet. The size and dimensions of the human figure, notwithstanding the fables of antiquity,[44] appear to have been much the same in all ages of the world. The Egyptian mummies of three thousand years standing, exhibit no difference in stature from the men of our own days; and we read that the Emperor Augustus was considered by the Romans as a person of middle stature, and his height is recorded as that of five feet, nine inches, of our measure.