Mr. Venables on Siliceous Gravel. 243 



indeed there is a strong tendency to urinary affections, partly 

 in consequence of such a locality. This patient, however, is 

 a native of Gloucestershire, and has been resident here only 

 about six weeks ; and during this time has daily used the 

 common pump water of the place. She also states that her 

 grandmother obliged her, when young, to drink a great deal of 

 sea-water, and she thought the sand thus introduced might 

 now be appearing ; but as many years have since elapsed, we 

 can hardly look to so remote an origin. There is one impor- 

 tant circumstance in her history which I must not omit, that 

 urinary disorders prevail in her family. 



It occurred to me that there might be a possibility of a 

 quantity of this very fine siliceous sand being pumped up with 

 the water, and remaining in mechanical suspension, as I have 

 occasionally seen. In this way, perhaps, some might be dis- 

 posed to account for its appearance in the urine; but the 

 objections to such a solution are many and various. In the 

 first place, others should be equally liable under similar cir- 

 cumstances ; yet, notwithstanding I have been in the habit 

 of attending closely to the properties of the urine, I have never 

 met with any instance of a similar nature, and it is highly pro- 

 bable that I should have met with them had they occurred. 

 Secondly, I have repeatedly been furnished with portions of 

 the water, pumped up in haste, and at a time too when she 

 was using it, and passing this siliceous matter, but I could 

 never detect the smallest portion of silex in mechanical sus- 

 pension. 



But even granting that it might, and actually had been so 

 introduced in this instance, such a solution involves still greater 

 difficulties. If introduced into the stomach, does the silex 

 undergo digestion, become dissolved, and thus enter the cir- 

 culating mass, and so arrive at the kidneys ? If so, it is 

 evident that the kidneys must reorganise the silex to precipi- 

 tate it in the crystallized form, for this can hardly be effected 

 any where else *. It may be asked, could not the silex be 



* But there is a still more weighty objection. If the seeds of pears, 

 apples, and fruit-stones, &c, can resist the solvent powers of the gastric 

 juice, we cannot well conceive them adequate to the solution of so re- 

 fractory a substance as silex, at least under ordinary circumstances. 



