VOL. IX.] PHILOSOPHICAL TBANSACTIONS. 155 



or usage, which might discover this inverted situation of his bowels, nor had 

 this contraposition any evident influence upon his diseases and death. He was 

 about thirty years of age, a married man, had several children, was of a middle 

 stature, healthful till toward the latter end of his time : had no prominency on 

 his left side more than the other; was not left-handed, nor had any weakness 

 on his left side. The observer adds, that some such, though none so com- 

 plete, instances of inverted bowels, are mentioned by Bartholin, in his second 

 century of observations, n. 29; and that Schenke mentions two others, 1. 3, 

 obs. 9, dejecore; one found by Gemma, another by Aquapendente. 



Account of the tivo Sorts of the Helmontian Laudanum, communicated to the 

 Editor hy the Hon. Robert Boyle \ with the Way of Baron F. M. Van Helmont,* 

 of preparing his Laudanum. N° 107, p. 147. 



As for the Helmontian laudanum, you may use your own liberty in suspect- 

 ing the receipts that go about of it. For the name itself seems ambiguous to 



* John Baptist van Helmont was bom of a good family, at Brassels, in 1577- After finishing his 

 education at Louvain, he travelled into various paits of tlie Continent, and on his return, settled at 

 VUvorde, where he dedicated a great portion of his time to the prosecution of chemical experiments, 

 and to the preparation of elixirs and other chemical remedies, by means of which he is said to have 

 performed the most astonishing cures, and to have attained to a degree of celebrity, as a practical 

 physician, almost unexampled. He attacked and refuted the doctrines of Aristotle and Galen, at 

 that time taught and revered in most of the universities on the Continent j and maintained, in their 

 stead, the hypotheses of the ancient pneumatics, with which he intermixed his own paradoxical 

 opinions expressed in a barbarous jargon, invented by himself. He died in l644, aged 67 ; although 

 he had asserted in several of his writings, that he had discovered the means of prolonging life, far 

 beyond what is generally believed to be its natural term. In the true spirit of empiricism, he ex- 

 tolled his Alkahest as a remedy for all diseases ; the origin of which he referred to the exasperation 

 and disturbance of his supposed Ardmus, an essence or being which he imagined to be distinct from 

 body and mind, &c. &c. 



In these days, when a clearer insight into the constitution of living bodies, enables us to form a 

 better estimate of the powers of those agencies which go under the name of remedies. Van Helmont 

 claims our attention rather as a chemist than as a physician. Paracelsus had taken some notice of that 

 aeriform fluid, which is extricated from fermenting liquors, and which he called spiritus sylvestris. 

 He thought, however, that it was similar to atmospheric air. Van Helmont examined it more 

 closely, and found that it was ver}' different from common air, possessing deleterious qualities. To 

 this and otlier aeriform fluids he gave the name of gas, a name adopted by modem chemists. In liis 

 complexionum atque mixtionum elementalium Figmentum, and in his Tractatus de Flatibus, he has 

 enumerated various species of gases, insomuch that one of tlie greatest chemists of tlie last century 

 confesses, that in reading the works of this author, he has found, with astonishment, an infinite 

 number of facts, which philosophers are accustomed to consider as more modern; and that on the 

 subject of i>ermanently elastic fluids. Van Helmont has mentioned almost every thing with which 

 we are now more thoroughly acquainted. The Elzevir edition of the collected works of this autlior, 

 is in one vol. 4to. The editions printed at Venice, Lyons, &:c. are in folio. A catalogue of his 



X 2 



