VOL. IX.] PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS. 153 



skin wan and ill-favoured, her pulse creeping, her appetite prostrate, her tongue 

 dry, her voice weak, her evacuations sparing, &c. ; but refusing to undergo 

 the operation of tapping, she was left to herself, and died three months after. 

 Her body being opened, there soon appeared a great lake of water ; whence at 

 first it seemed to be a common ascites, a tumor of waters stagnating in the 

 abdomen. Then the liver being looked after, it was no where seen. Next tiie 

 other viscera being sought for, viz. the mesentery, pancreas, spleen, and kid- 

 neys, none of them appeared, to the astonishment of all that were present, who 

 searching further, and meeting with the peritonaeum, found it to be turned into 

 a bag, by a separation made of its interior membrane from its exterior, and so 

 inclosing within it the whole bulk of that restagnant water, that not a drop of 

 it could pass into the abdomen. And the compass of this bag formed by the 

 two membranes, reached from the pubes to the diaphragm, and from the left 

 region of the loins to the right ; so that the nervous body of the peritonaeum, 

 was by little and little expanded, as the capacity of the womb in gravidation is 

 still more and more enlarged, which yet had become very thick, being thicker 

 and closer than any ox's hide, whereas naturally it is as thin as a silken, web. 

 This bag of the peritonaeum being removed, the viscera came to view, which 

 were not gravelly, nor tartareous, nor chalky, as they often are in hydropical 

 bodies, but only decayed and colourless : which decay, by the timely use of an 

 incision, might have been prevented. 



Account of Three Books, N° 106, p. 134. 



I. De Secretione Animali Cogitata, Auth. Guil. Cole, M. D. Oxon. 1674, 

 in 12mo. 



In this treatise a principal share in the business of secretion is erroneously at- 

 tributed to fermentation. 



II. Erasmi Bartholini ^electa Geometrica, Hauniae, An. 1674, in 4to. 

 These Selecta Geometrica are : — First, a general method to come to an 



equation, by reducing all sorts of questions to general heads: where the learned 

 author reduces to one head, for instance, all problems of proportionals, both 

 arithmetical, geometrical, and harmonical ; but treating here only of the two 

 latter, and more largely of the last of all. — The second is his dioristice ; in 

 which, having observed how far short the ancient geometricians came of a 

 general art of determining problems, he says he has endeavoured to supply that 

 defect, by delivering here two general rules for determining the limits of 

 equations, so as to know how many roots are possible : in the first of which he 

 follows the rule of that famous geometrician Fermat : in the second he agrees 



VOL. II. X 



