612 PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS. [aNNO 16? I, 



alleged to assert a vacuum : And from thence solves a great many phaenomena 

 in nature; as, about the Torricellian experiment, and others thereunto apper- 

 taining ; about siphons, pumps, syringes, cupping-glasses, &c. about the na- 

 ture of fluidity; (where he examines and animadverts upon the Cartesian 

 doctrine concerning the same :) the ascent of water above its level (in small 

 pipes and otherwise;) and its contracting itself into globular drops : of its ex- 

 pansion in freezing, and its strength thereupon : of the degrees of velocity in 

 lighter bodies ascending in water; and of water running out of tubes or other 

 vessels perforated at the bottom: of fermentations ; and dissolving salts, metals, 

 &c. in liquid menstruums : with many more, too numerous to repeat here. 



II. Dissertationes duae Medicae de Veneno Pestilenti : Studio Caroli de la 

 Font, M.D. et in Acad. Avenion. Prof, primar. Amstelodami, in 12mo. 



These dissertations are filled with absurd conjectures and reasonings concern- 

 ing the nature of pestilential contagion, which the author derives from arsenical 

 exhalations infecting and corrupting the air, &c. &c. 



III. Tractatus de Corde, item de Motu et Colore Sanguinis, et Chyli in 

 eum transitu : Cui accessit Dissertatio de Origine Catarrhi. Auth. Richardo 

 Lower, M. D. Editio tertia et novissima. Amstelodami, 1671, in 8vo. 



Having already given an account of the principal part of this treatise in 

 N°45 of these Trans, when it was printed the first time; we shall here only add 

 something about the newly annexed dissertation of the origin and cure of 

 rheums [catarrhs] . As to their origin, the learned author, having declared, 

 with the generality of physicians, that rheums are bred from the serous part of 

 the blood, severed from it by an impeded transpiration, he undertakes to evince 

 the erroneousness of the vulgar opinion, deriving all sorts of defluxions from 

 the brain, by showing, that, whereas the authors and teachers of that tenet do 

 acknowledge, that the water collected in the ventricles of the brain distils only 

 through the os cribriforme into the nose, and through the glandula pituitaria 

 into the palate, the structure of those parts is such, that that can be done 

 neither of these ways ; which assertion of his is accompanied with divers con- 

 siderable observations and experiments ; as also with an answer to those that 

 apprehend great danger to the brain from the excrementitious matter gathered 

 therein, if it should not be purged out from thence by the eyes, nostrils, ears, 

 and the palate. Which being dispatched, he proceeds to suggest the ways of 

 stopping and curing defluxions, by observing, that, since the matter for rheums 

 is furnished by the serum of the blood, whatever is able to withdraw that 

 pabulum, or to precipitate the serosity through the kidneys, or to convey it 

 away by siege, or to dispel it through the pores of the body, is sufficient to 

 perform the cure. 



