their origin, formation, composition, texture, variety, offices, &c. See ANATOMY.

BONES Whitened for Skeletons. Two processes are described in the Acta Haffnienia for whitening bones, Bones. Professor Rau had a method of giving them a great degree of whiteness. By bare exposure to the air, sun, and rain, for a length of time, they become notably white; but the whitest bones, kept in a room tainted with smoke or fuliginous vapours, grow in a little time yellowish, brownish, and unsightly. It is customary for the purification of bones, to boil them in alkaline liquors; which, by dissolving and extracting the superfluous fat, improves their whiteness.

BONES Hardened and Softened. Boerhaave observes, that alkaline salts render bones harder and firmer, and that acids make them softer and more flexible. These effects succeed in certain circumstances, but not universally; for bones may be hardened and softened both by acids and by alkalies, according to the quantity of saline matter employed, and the matter in which it is applied. Newman made bones harder and more compact by treating them with the strongest of the mineral acids; though, when the acid is in sufficient proportion, it destroys or dissolves them. In Papin's digester (a strong close vessel in which the steam of boiling liquors is confined, and the fluid by this means made to undergo a greater degree of heat than it could otherwise sustain), the hardest bones are reduced in a short time, by the action of simple water into a soft pap or jelly; and alkaline liquors produce this effect still sooner.

In the history of the French Academy for the years 1742 and 1743, there is an account that Mr. Geoffroy produced before the academy a small ivory spoon, which by long lying in mustard, was become flexible and transparent like horn: that Mr. Fouchy saw an ivory spoon, which, by lying for a considerable time in milk, was become supple like feather; and that Mr. Hunaud produced bones, which had been softened by steeping in vinegar, afterwards hardened to their natural state by steeping in water, and softened a second time by steeping in vinegar. Dr Lewis observed that the nitrous and marine acids diluted, and the acetic acid, make bones flexible and tough like leather; but that the diluted vitriolic acid, though it renders them notably soft, makes them at the same time brittle. It seems as if a great part of the earthy matter, which is the basis of the bone, and on which its hardness depends, was dissolved and extracted by the three first; whilst the latter, incapable of dissolving this kind of earth into a liquid form, only corrodes it into a kind of felicite concrete, which remains intermixed in minute particles among the gelatinous matter. Dr Lewis did not find that the softened bones, whatever acid they were softened by, recovered their hardness by steeping in water. Slips of softened ivory, after lying above a month in water, continued nearly as soft as when they were taken out of the acid liquor.

There is a singular induration of bones produced by fire; the effects of which agent are here remarkably different according to its degree and the circumstances of its application. Bones exposed to a moderate fire, either in open vessels, or in contact with the burning fuel, become opaque, white, and friable throughout; and an increase of fire, after they have once suffered this change, renders them only more and more friable. But if they are urged at first with a strong fire, such as that in which copper or iron melts, they become hard, semitransparent, and sonorous, like the hard mineral stones. This curious experiment deserves to be further prosecuted.

Colouring of BONES. Bones may be stained of a variety of colours by the common dyeing infusions and decoctions of animal and vegetable substances. They are stained also, without heat, by metallic solutions; and by means of these may be spotted or variegated at pleasure. Thus, solution of silver in aquafortis gives a brown or black according to its quantity; solution of gold in aqua regia, or in the spirit of salt, a fine purple; solution of copper in the acetic acid, a fine green; and solutions of the same metal in volatile alkalies, a blue, which is at first deep and beautiful, but changes, upon exposure to the air, into a green or bluish-green. If the bone is but touched with the two first solutions, and exposed to the air, it does not fail to acquire the colour in a few hours: In the two latter, it requires to be steeped for a day or longer in order to its imbibing the colour. In these and other cases where immersion for some time is necessary, the bone may be variegated, by covering such parts as are to remain white, with wax or any other matter that the liquor will not dissolve or penetrate.

Occasional Uses of BONES. Bones are a very useful article, not only for making different kinds of toys, but likewise in several of the chemical arts; as, for making cast iron malleable, for absorbing the sulphur of sulphureous ores; for forming tests and cupels, or vessels for refining gold and silver with lead (burnt bones composing a mass of a porous texture, which absorbs the vitrified-lead and other matters, while the unvitreifiable gold and silver remain entire behind); for the preparation of milky glazes and porcelains; for the rectification of volatile salts and empyreumatic oils; and for making glue. The bones of different animals are not equally fit for these uses: even the glue, or gelatinous part of the bones of one animal is notably different both in quantity and cohesiveness from that of another.

The human skull-bone, or cranium, the natural defence of the seat of sensation and perception in the noblest animal, has been recommended medicinally as a cure for epilepsies, deliria, and all disorders of the senses, from the fame philosophy which ascribed antispasmodic virtues to the lungs of the long-winged fox; and expected, because fowls are said to digest even small stones, that the skin of the gizzard, dried and powdered, would produce a similar effect in the human stomach. To such lengths of extravagance have the fans of physic been carried by the blind superstition of former ages!

BONES in the funeral Solemnities of the Ancients.—Divers usages and ceremonies relating to the bones of the dead have obtained in different ages; as gathering them from the funeral pile, washing, anointing, and depositing them in urns, and thence into tombs; translating them, which was not to be done without the authority of the pontiffs; not to say worshipping of them, still practised to the bones of the saints in the Romish church. Among the ancients, the bones of travellers and soldiers dying in foreign countries were brought home to be buried; till, by an express S. C. made during the Italic war it was forbid, and the soldiers bodies ordered to be buried where they died.

The Romans had a peculiar deity under the denomination Bones. mination of Offiago, to whom the care of the induration and knitting of the human bones was committed; and who, on that account, was the object of the adoration of all breeding women.

Fossil or Petrified BONES, are those found in the earth, frequently at great depths, in all the strata, even in the bodies of stones and rocks; some of them of a huge size, usually supposed to be the bones of giants, but more truly of elephants or hippopotami. It is supposed they were repotted in those strata when all things were in a state of solution; and that they incorporated and petrified with the bodies where they happened to be lodged.

In the museum of the Russian Academy of Sciences, there is a vast collection of fossil bones, teeth, and horns, of the elephant, rhinoceros, and buffalo, which have been found in different parts of this empire, but more particularly in the southern regions of Siberia. Naturalists have been puzzled to account for so great a variety being found in a country where the animals of which they formerly made a part were never known to exist. It was the opinion of Peter, who, though he deserves to be esteemed a great monarch, was certainly no great naturalist, that the teeth found near Voronetz were the remains of elephants belonging to the army of Alexander the Great, who according to some historians, crossed the Don, and advanced as far as Koftinka. The celebrated Bayer, whose authority carries greater weight in the literary world, conjectures, that the bones and teeth found in Siberia belonged to elephants common in that country during the wars which the Mogul monarchs carried on with the Persians and Indians; and this plausible supposition seems in some measure to be corroborated by the discovery of the entire skeleton of an elephant in one of the Siberian tombs. But this opinion, as Mr Palas† very justly observes, is sufficiently refuted by the consideration, that the elephants employed in the armies of all India could never have afforded the vast quantities of teeth which have been discovered, not to mention those which it is justly to be presumed may still be buried. They have been already dug up in such plenty as to make a considerable article of trade. The same ingenious naturalist has given an ample description of these fossil bones, and has endeavoured to account for their origin. Upon examining those in the museum, he was led to conclude, that as these bones are equally dispersed in all the northern regions of Europe, the climate probably was in the earlier ages less severe than at present, and then possibly sufficiently warm to be the native countries of the elephant, rhinoceros, and other quadrupeds, now found only in the southern climates. But when he visited, during his travels, the spots where the fossil bodies were dug up, and could form a judgment from his own observations, and not from the accounts of others, he renounced his former hypothesis; and, in conformity with the opinions of many modern philosophers, asserted, that they must have been brought by the waters; and that nothing but a sudden and general inundation, such as the deluge, could have transported them from their native countries in the south, to the regions of the north. In proof of this assertion, he adds, that the bones are generally found separate, as if they had been scattered by the waves, covered with a stratum of mud evidently formed by the waters, and commonly intermixed with the remains of marine plants, and similar substances; instances of which he himself observed during his progress through Siberia, and which sufficiently prove that these regions of Asia were once overwhelmed with the sea.

We often find in the earth petrified bones, the greatest part of their gelatinous matter being extracted by the moisture, and a stony one introduced in its room. In some parts of France petrified bones are met with which have an impregnation of copper. Hence, on being calcined in an open fire, a volatile salt is produced from the remains of their gelatinous principle, and the bone is tinged throughout of a fine greenish blue colour; copper always striking a blue with volatile alkalies. The French turquoise stones are no other than these bones prepared by calcination: they are very durable, and bear to be worked and polished nearly in the same manner as glass; without the imperfection inseparable from glassy bodies, of being brittle. See the article TURCOISE.

There have been lately discovered several enormous skeletons, five or fix feet beneath the surface, on the banks of the Ohio, not far from the river Miami in America, 700 miles from the sea-coast. Some of the tusks are seven, others ten feet long; one foot fix inches in circumference at the base, and one foot near the point; the cavity at the root or base, 19 inches deep. Besides their size, there are several other differences which will not allow the supposition of their having been elephants: the tusks of the true elephant have sometimes a very slight lateral bend; these have a larger twist, or spiral curve, towards the smaller end: but the great and specific difference consists in the shape of the grinding teeth: which, in these newly found, are fashioned like the teeth of a carnivorous animal; not flat and ribbed transversely on their surface like those of the modern elephant, but furnished with a double row of high and conic processes, as if intended to masticate, not to grind, their food. A third difference is in the thigh-bone, which is of great disproportionable thickness to that of the elephant; and has also some other anatomical variations. These fossil bones have been also found in Peru and the Brazils; and when cut and polished by the workers in ivory, appear in every respect similar. It is the opinion of Dr Hunter, that they must have belonged to a larger animal than the elephant; and differing from it, in being carnivorous. But as yet this formidable creature has evaded our search; and if indeed, such an animal exists, it is happy for man that it keeps at a distance; since what ravage might not be expected from a creature, endowed with more than the strength of the elephant, and all the rapacity of the tiger? See MAMMOUTH.

BONE-Spanish. See Farriery Index.

BON ESPERANCE, the same with the Cape of Good Hope. See GOOD HOPE.