OF NATURAL PHILOSOPHY. 51 



found to occur most appositely in illustration and 

 support of a variety of new, curious, and instructive 

 views then gaining ground in chemistry, and thus 

 exercise a marked influence over the whole body of 

 that science. Curiosity is excited : the origin of the 

 new substance is traced to the sea-plants from whose 

 ashes the principal ingredient of soap is obtained, 

 and ultimately to the sea-water itself. It is thence 

 hunted through nature, discovered in salt mines and 

 springs, and pursued into all bodies which have a 

 marine origin ; among the rest, into sponge. A 

 medical practitioner * then calls to mind a reputed 

 remedy for the cure of one of the most grievous and 

 unsightly disorders to which the human species is 

 subject the goitre which infests the inhabitants 

 of mountainous districts to an extent that in this 

 favoured land we have happily no experience of, 

 and which was said to have been originally cured by 

 the ashes of burnt sponge. Led by this indication 

 he tries the effect of iodine on that complaint, and 

 the result establishes the extraordinary fact that 

 this singular substance, taken as a medicine, acts 

 with the utmost promptitude and energy on goitre, 

 dissipating the largest and most inveterate in a short 

 time, and acting (of course, like all medicines, even 

 the most approved, with occasional failures,) as a 

 specific, or natural antagonist, against that odious 

 deformity. It is thus that any accession to our know- 

 ledge of nature is sure, sooner or later, to make itself 

 felt in some practical application, and that a benefit 

 conferred on science by the casual observation or 

 shrewd remark of even an unscientific or illiterate 

 * Dr. Coindet of Geneva. 

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