IQO PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS. [aNNO 166/. 



An Account of some Booh. A""" 28, p. 532. 



I. Free Considerations about Subordinate Forms ; by the Honourable Robert 

 Boyle. 



This tract is an appendix to the noble author's Examen of Substantial 

 Forms. 



II. Joh. Swammerdam, M. D. de Respiratione et Usu Pulmonum. John 

 Swammerdam,=* M. D. on Respiration and the Use of the Lungs. 



This author is of opinion, that all those philosophers who have hitherto in- 

 quired into the nature and use of respiration have only caught the shadow of 

 it, nothing of the substance. And he gives this for the chief reason, because 

 they have been too negligent in considering the first manifest motion of the 

 breast and lungs in a foetus ; which particular being understood, he thinks it 

 very easy to judge of the respiration of born animals. He scruples not to re- 

 prehend the immortal Doctor Harvey, for having excluded from the office of 



to relate in this work several other writings on this curious subject by Dr. Hook, Dr. Halley, and 

 other persons. And it is to be lamented that all philosophical societies, in all countries, do not ob- 

 serve and publish in their Transactions, at least annually, the state of the magnetic direction, in tlieir 

 respective situations. 



* This celebrated anatomist and natural historian was born at Amsterdam in l637. His falher was 

 an apothecary in that city, and possessed a small cabinet of natural curiosities, by the frequent sur- 

 vey of which his son acquired a taste for those pursuits, by which he afterwards rendered himself so 

 conspicuous. He studied at Leyden, where he took his degree of doctor in medicine in 1667, but 

 never engaged in the practice of physic, devoting himself wholly to anatomical and physiological in- 

 quiries, and to collecting and examining insects. Of this class of animated beings he investigated tlie? 

 generation, structure, and metamorphoses, with astonishing patience and assiduity, and described and 

 elucidated the same in his admirable work entitled, A General History of Insects, first published in the 

 Dutch language in 1669, and afterwards translated into Latin. His Historia Ephemerae appeared in 

 1675. These and other observations, relative to the natural history of insects, were collected into a 

 folio vol. (Dutch and Latin) printed at Leyden in 1737:, under tlie title of Biblia Naturae sive Histo- 

 ria Insectorum. This edition was superintended by Boerhaave, who wrote tlie biographical memoirs 

 which are prefixed to it ; but the Latin translation was by Gaubius. Besides tlie tract on respiration, 

 of which an account is given in the present Number of the Transactions, Swammerdam wrote another 

 anatomical work, entitled, Miraculum Naturae seu Uteri Muliebris Fabrica, published in 1672. He 

 appears to have been the first who practised the art of injecting tlie blood-vessels with wax; for his 

 countryman and contemporary Ruysch learned this method of him. Having neglected to improve his 

 finances by the exercise of his profession as a physician, he was much straitened in his circumstances; 

 and some years before his death, which happened in l6S0, he became a prey to melancholy and su- 

 perstition. His collection of insects and other objects belonging to natural history, for which the 

 Grand Duke of Florence once offered him 1 2,000 florins, was sold for a very inconsiderable sum. 

 We shall have occasion to notice one or two communications of his in the subsequent volumes of the 

 Transactions. 



