46 PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS. [aNNO 16q5. 



deluge, he finds it punctually and exactly agreeable to this account which we 

 have from nature ; and endeavours to show that Dr. Burnet, in his theory, 

 having in almost all these heads receded from the Mosaic account, has mani- 

 festly receded from nature and matter of fact. 



An Account of a Paper, entituled, Archibaldi Pilcarnii,* M.D. Dissertalio de 

 Febribus, &c. ^n Extract from the Latin. N° 217, p. 123. 



This author shows that the solution and termination of fevers are effected 

 by an elimination of the morbific matter, (humorem morbificum) through some 

 one or other of the excretory passages, whether that matter shall have been 

 derived from without or generated within the body. 



He next shows that the perspiration (including the halitus from the lungs 

 which is analogous to the cutaneous exhalation), is, in the human subject, ten 

 times as much as the alvine excretion. Hence he infers, that fevers are ten 

 times oftener cured by medicines which increase perspiration, than they are by 

 those which evacuate the bov/els ; adding, however, that an evacuation of the 

 bowels, when produced by a gentle cathartic, tends at the same time to promote 

 perspiration, to which therefore the benefit that follows should in part be 

 referred. 



He then attempts to demonstrate from the known laws of mechanics, that in 

 fevers (in which the pulse is more frequent than natural) the velocity of the 

 blood is greater than natural ; and that if the pulse be both greater and more 

 frequent than natural, the quantity also as well as the velocity of the blood 

 circulating within a given time, must be greater than natural. 



* Dr. Archibald Pitcairn was born at Edinburgh in l652, and after studying hotb divinity and 

 law, he at length took lo the profession of physic. Having made himself known by a Latin disser- 

 tation, De Inventorihus, l688, wherein he vindicated in a very able manner (he merits of Harvey, 

 and his discovery of the circulation of the blood, he was invited to hold a medical professorship in 

 the university of Leyden, where he went in I6'92; but he returned to Edinburgh the year follow- 

 ing, to fulfil a matrimonial engagement with a daughter of Sir Archibald Stephenson. In conse- 

 quence of this event he was obliged lo resign his appointment in Holland, as the lady's parents 

 objected to her going abroad. He died in 1713. Besides 8 or 10 Dissertationes Medicae, we have 

 his Elementa Medicina;, being the substance of the lectures he read to his pupils. His writings on 

 medical subjects were reprinted at Leyden in 1737, under the title of Opera omnia medica, 4to. 

 Dr. Pitcairn was a man of great learning and classical acquirements ; and at the same time was well 

 versed in the science of mathematics ; upon the principles of which he endeavoured, after the ex- 

 ample of Borelli and Bellini, to account for the principal phaenomena, both natural and morbid, 

 which occur in the animal body : as if it were possible to reduce to mathematical demonstration 

 the action of tubes and pores whose diameters are perpetually varying, and which moreover are sub- 

 ject to a power, (the living principle,,) whose degree of intensity is at no two moments of our existence 

 precisely the same ; a power which scarcely admits of definition, much less of being estimated by 

 geometrical rules. 



