394 URINEc 



URINE. 



If there were any branch of zoo-chemistry from which phy- 

 siology and medicine might reasonably have expected to reap any 

 certain knowledge in reference to the vegetative processes in the 

 animal body in health and disease^ it was assuredly the urine. 

 For if the physical properties and changes exhibited by this 

 secretion, under different conditions, had even attracted the 

 attention of the ancients, and led them to the knowledge of a 

 number of highly significant, although unexplained facts, the 

 subject could not fail, from its accessible nature, early to become a 

 matter of inquiry on the revival of scientific investigation. The 

 readiness with which the urine might be obtained, necessarily 

 facilitated the labours of experimentalists in a greater degree than is 

 the case with most other objects submitted to analytical investiga- 

 tion. Hence the early inquirers, whose attention was chiefly directed 

 to the observation of animal phenomena, made the elucidation of 

 this subject a special object of their investigations. Men such as 

 van Helmontj Boerhaave, and others,, who excelled in all branches 

 of the sciences cultivated in their age, instituted several very 

 admirable experiments with the urine ; while those who aided in 

 establishing modern chemistry, amongst whom we may instance 

 Cruikshank, Fourcroy, and Vauquelin, have left us tolerably 

 perfect analyses of this highly compound fluid. At the beginning 

 of the present century, the analysis of the urine was one of the 

 earliest investigations of Berzelius, and it still ranks, after a 

 period of fifty years, as an index of the composition of this fluid, 

 as well as a type of the mode in which an analytical inquiry should 

 be conducted. Modern investigators have devoted themselves, 

 with all the ardour and enthusiasm of a newly created or revived 

 science, to the chemical examination of the urine, and hence 

 modern literature is overcharged with works on the subject. We 

 have here no lack of systematic inquiries, conducted from phy- 

 siological, or pathological^ points of view, or of individual analyses 

 which have been undertaken with reference to some point of pure 

 chemistry, or for purposes of special diagnosis. In the place of 

 any such deficiency, we have so vast an accumulation of such 

 labours, that one might be disposed to believe^ judging by its 

 bulk, that the study of the urine was the most complete portion 



