Posted on 01/26/2010 6:24:55 PM PST by SunkenCiv
The bottle containing the bones first surfaced at a pharmacy in 1867. Its label read: "Remains found under the pyre of Joan of Arc, maiden of Orleans." Different techniques, including DNA analysis, several forms of microscopy, chemical analysis and carbon dating, were used to examine the bottle's contents. A few years ago, Philippe Charlier, a forensic scientist at Raymond Poincare Hospital in Garches, France, and his team first determined that the bottle contained an approximately 4-inch-long human rib covered with a black coating. It also housed part of a cat femur covered with the same coating, three fragments of "charcoal" and "a brownish textile scrap" about the same length as the rib. Charlier said some historians then speculated that a cat, perhaps symbolizing the devil, was thrown onto Joan of Arc's funeral pyre. Carbon dating, however, found that the objects predate the French heroine's lifetime by many centuries. The "textile scrap" is likely a mummy wrapping, since "the chemical composition of the coatings was comparable with that of embalming products, such as those used by the old Egyptians," the researchers concluded. The dark coating contained a mix of bitumen, wood resins, gypsum and other chemicals. Pine pollen was also identified, probably from pine resin, commonly used during Egyptian embalming. The researchers believe the remains were first stored as "mummia," which were parts of Egyptian mummies used in medieval pharmaceuticals. Medieval medicine, for example, may call for a compress made of a mummy bit and the juice of an herb (Bursa pastoris) to stop nosebleeds.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.discovery.com ...
Some relics are very tiny and difficult to see. At any rate, as far as I know, every Catholic church has relics in it somewhere.
Well at least some (most) of them did until John XXIII threw out most of the "saints". That pretty much killed the old relic business.
Got a match?
Ia that what passes for “incorrupt” these days?
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