1815.) Scientific Intelligence. 393 
urine of one of his patients, a female labouring under chronic 
hepatitis. He had been struck with the absence of most of the 
usual qualities ot that fluid, such as colour and smell, of both which 
it was nearly destitute. I found its specific gravity to be only. 1*0033 
(the average of healthy urine being 1°0200) ; and its solid contents, 
‘not perfectly dried, did not exceed 25 grs. from the wine pint. 
Finding that no precipitate was occasioned by adding nitric acid to 
the extract dissolved in a little water, I tried to discover urea in 
another portion of the same urine by the more accurate test, which 
I have proposed, of distillation. The distilled fluid very slowly re- 
stored the colour of reddening litmus paper, but did not precipitate 
muriate of lime. It could, therefore, have contained nothing more 
than a mere trace of carbonate of ammonia, which is always abun- 
dantly produced by the distillation of natural urine. As the patient 
recovered, the urea was very gradually and slowly restored to the 
urine. These experiments confirm the curious discovery of Mr. 
Rose ; to which it may be added, that the urine of Dr. Holme’s 
patient did not contain an appreciable quantity of uric acid. I was 
sorry that other engagements interfered at the time, and prevented 
me from determining exactly the nature of its other contents, . 
An opportunity lately occurred to me of ascertaining precisely the 
proportion of urea in the urine of a patient labouring under diabetes 
mellitus in its most perfect form, before the disease was influenced 
either by diet or medicines. A wine pint gave 651 grains of solid 
extract; aud of this only 16 grs., or =; part, were urea. No urea 
could be discovered by the action of nitric acid. The processes 
employed in detecting it were those which I have described in the 
Medico-Chirurgical Transactions, ii. 123; and in your Annals of 
Philosophy, i. 31. 
P.S. I have often been applied to of late to know where the 
hydrometer for taking the specific gravity of urine may be purchased. . 
It may be acceptable, therefore, to some of your readers, to know 
that a more easy method (and a preferable one, as it requires a much 
less quantity of urine, and no calculation) is to weigh the urine in 
a bottle which holds exactly 1000 grs. of distilled water at 60° 
‘ahr. up to a mark on the neck. Bottles of this sort, with a proper 
counterpoise, and decimal weights in a case, may be had in London 
of Mr. Knight, 41, Foster-lane, Cheapside ; and, I dare say, of 
Mr. Accum, in Compton-street, and other makers of chemical 
apparatus. 
VI. Almospheric Phenomenon. 
About a quarter before ten o’clock on Tuesday evening, Sept. 26, 
Fomalhaut being a little to the east of the meridian, the barometer 
being 29°62, and the thermometer 62°, a luminous band appeared 
near the western horizon, and extended itself gradually towards the 
east, until it occupied a line beginning at the sixth of the Eagle, 
passing through the Fox and Goose, between the fifth and sixth of 
the Swan, across Almaac, in Andromeda, and Medusa’s Head, and 
