Footnote

b Since the elements making up the human body are over 90 percent water, it would require a fire with volcanic heat, a fire reaching a temperature of from 3000 to 5000 degrees Fahrenheit, to destroy it. Thus we can appreciate why sulphur (brimstone) was added to the fires burning in the Gehenna outside the walls of ancient Jerusalem in order to speed up and effect as far as possible the total destruction of the dead bodies pitched into it.

Dr. Wilton Krogman, professor of physical anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, has said that he has watched a body in a crematorium burn at 2000 degrees Fahrenheit for more than eight hours, burning under the best possible conditions as regards heat and combustion, everything being controlled; but at the end of that time he saw scarcely a bone that was not still present and altogether recognizable as a human bone. True, it was calcined, but it had not become an ash or powder. It was only at more than 3000 degrees Fahrenheit that he saw a bone turn liquid and run and become volatile.—See the article “The Baffling Burning Death,” by Allan W. Eckert, in the magazine entitled “True The Man’s Magazine,” as of May 1964, pages 33, 105-112.