488 PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS. ' [aNNO 1700. 



the soundings and the setting of the tide of flood. At the end is annexed a 

 learned essay concerning the Thule of the ancients. 



On a Polypus of the Lungs. Bi/ M. Bussiere, F. R. S. N° 203, p. 545. ' 

 A boy 5 years of age died at Kensington of a consumption. A year before he 

 died he was troubled with a dry cough, which continued ever after, spitting now 

 and then a little blood ; JO or 12 days before he died his nurse took notice of 

 some thick skin, as she said, he spit out. His pliysician having examined one 

 of them, found it had the consistence and shape of a vessel, which made him 

 think it might perhaps be some vessel of the lungs. The child being dead I 

 was sent by his relations to open the body. I began by the abdomen, in which 

 I found nothing of moment, except that the omentum was quite destitute of 

 fat, so were likewise all the parts of the body, and the glands of the mesentery 

 were hardened and blackish. In the left side of the lungs I found a little puru- 

 lent sanies; the inside of the trachea or wind-pipe was incrustated with a slimy 

 membrane, insomuch that the pellicle made a perfect vessel from the larynx to 

 the very extremities of the bronchia, from which it came off very easily without 

 breaking either the trunk or the branches. It adhered to the inner coat of 

 the trachea, only by small filaments, which were so tender that they easily 

 broke off, which made me think the production of that extraordinary vessel 

 was nothing but the mucilaginous humour which is continually discharged by 

 the glands of the trachea, which being grown more clammy by the distemper, 

 was reduced to a kind of jelly by the dryness of the air, which dryness not 

 permitting the spitting it out, incrustated the inside of the trachea and bronchia, 

 and growing thicker was at last shaken off by the violent fit of coughing the 

 child was sometimes taken with, and then was renewed again by the succeeding 

 mucus. Having taken this new vessel out of the lungs, I put it in hot water, 

 to try if it could be dissolved by it, but it resisted. The vessels of the lungs, 

 that is, the trachea and bronchia, the pulmonary arteries and veins, were all 

 whole and sound. 



Extract of a Letter from Dr. Wallace to Mynheer Leibnitz at Hanover, concerning 

 some easy Methods for the Measuring of Curve-lined Figures, Plain and Solid. 

 N° 263, p. 547. Translated from the Latin. 



In a letter of mine to you, dated July 30, \^Q7 , and since printed in vol. iii. 

 of my mathematical works, among other methods for quadratures, are these 

 two: the one I call the method of convolution and evolution, the other the 

 method of complication and explication. By help of these I show which is the 

 simplest manner of measuring ail curve figures, and particularly the cycloid. 



