VOL. IX.] PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS, l65 



Upon adult persons, especially when they are very corpulent and fat, and the 

 stone large and closely adhering; since it appears not, how in such subjects the 

 operator can reach the bottom of the bladder. Thirdly, that it is very doubtful, 

 whether the bladder can be thus thrust and turned at pleasure, as he pretends ; 

 and that it cannot but exceedingly torture the patient, to make such com- 

 pressions, as must needs be made, both to thrust down the stone, and to force 

 the whole bladder to descend to the perinasum. And fourthly, it seems to our 

 author very suspicious, that this operator puts his fingers into the fundament, 

 before he places his patient in a due posture to cut him. Fifthly, notice is here 

 taken, that this operator dispatches some in two or three minutes, but others he 

 holds above thirty minutes; and our author can give himself no other reason 

 for it, but that he deceives those, and cuts these. Sixthly, he notes that this 

 pretended artist makes in some but very slight and superficial compressions, 

 and that very few of his patients make water at the wound, even not at the 

 moment of the operation. What other cause can there be, than that those 

 who urine are really cut, and those that do not urine, receive but a mere in- 

 cision ? Seventhly, he observes, that those that are cured of their incision in 

 five or six days, whom he proves to have been deceived, are free from all the 

 ordinary symptoms of this cutting, but remain subject to the same dysuria, and 

 make as thick and fetid urine as before : whereas in others, whom he cuts in- 

 deed, the cicatrice is long in forming, and is preceded by divers accidents ; but 

 then, indolence, and the exemption from fits of the stone, and the clearness of 

 the urine, do presently follow after the operation. To all which our author 

 adds, that his proofs are more than convincing, when at the end of three days, 

 upon sounding, a stone is found in some, and none in others. 



In the second and third letters, our author relates, that a certain person of 

 Normandy, whom the new pretender affirmed upon sounding to have no stone, 

 was cut of a stone of three ounces weight ; and that he dying some days after 

 it, and being opened, his bladder was found not only full of very hard callosi- 

 ties, like ganglions about the nerves, but also lumps of a white, grumous, solid 

 and friable matter, like white tartar, which was as it were cemented upon the 

 scirrhous substance of the bladder : besides, there were fastened to the same 

 bladder certain caruncles, resembling the heart of a pullet, large at their basis, 

 and by little and little growing narrower, and ending in a point, of a fresh Ver- 

 million colour, which end was loose, whereas their basis stuck close to the 

 bladder, by very many filaments, which as so many roots nourished them, and 

 made them look so fresh in this their soil. 



Lastly, He observed store of little strange bodies, that were so interposed 

 between the woof of the fibres of the bladder, that it was thereby exceedingly 



