Mr. Peacock talked ... at much length about Jeremy Bentham, with whom he had been extremely intimate — dining with him tête-à-tête once a week for years together. He mentioned among other things that when experiments were being made with Mr. Bentham's body after his death, Mr. James Mill had one day come into Mr. Peacock's room at the India House and told him that there had exuded from Mr. Bentham's head a kind of oil, which was almost unfreezable, and which he conceived might be used for the oiling of chronometers which were going into high latitudes.
'The less you say about that, Mill,' said Peacock, 'the better it will be for you; because if the fact once becomes known, just as we see now in the newspapers that a fine bear is to be killed for his grease, we shall be having advertisements to the effect that a fine philosopher is to be killed for his oil.'
From Grant Duff, Notes, i. 60.