VOL. XXXI.] PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS. 489 



thickness of the skin, as Ruysch will have it. In others it is pellucid ; and 

 then the medulla terminates at once at the aperture of the spine, and does not 

 shoot out into any ramifications. This before us is composed of both species, 

 the greater part of which was pellucid ; the less, viz. the apex, opaque. 



The back-bone itself is not cleft, but has its vertebrae, with their other pro- 

 cesses entire, and is only defective in its spines or acute ones. But that portion 

 of the vertebrae, which should make an acute angle, from whence their spinal 

 processes naturally arise, in order to form the specus or passage for the marrow, 

 instead of that, gapes and lies almost in a straight line on each side; whereby 

 the medulla is defrauded of its usual guard from external injuries. This defect 

 begins at the third vertebra of the loins, and is continued to the end of the os 

 sacrum. 



As the case before us is a vitium conformationis, owing to the mother's 

 imagination ; so the same sometimes is occasioned by matter lodging on the 

 spine, and eroding the vertebrae by its acrimony : but then the bone is carious, 

 whereas in these praeternatural cases, there remain no such footsteps. 



These cases are incurable, and must in a little time kill the patient. But it is 

 almost immediate death to open the tumor ; which every surgeon will naturally 

 do, that has not seen or read concerning it. 



On the change of Colour in Grapes and Jessamine. By Mr. Henry Cane, 



N° 366, p. 102. 



About 6 years since I planted against a wall, a cutting from a Muscadine vine, 

 on an eastern aspect, where it has the sun from its rise till half an hour after 12. 

 The soil is a stiff clay, but to make it work the better, I meliorated it, by mixing 

 some rubbish of the foundation of an old brick wall, where it now grows. Two 

 years since, it shot out at both ends about 22 inches of a side, before it came to a 

 joint; that on the right was a very luxurious exuberant branch, as large as the body 

 of the tree, the other side not half so thick, and the leaves on the right were as 

 large again as those on the left-hand, and I fancy the largest that were ever seen. 

 The right-hand bears a very large and good black grape, and large bunches ; 

 the left-hand very good white grapes, and I had last year more bunches of the 

 white than of the black; and whereas in all vines bearing black and blue grapes, 

 the leaves die red, these died white on the black side as well as the other. Last 

 January I pruned the tree again, but tacked up more of the right-hand (being 

 black) than I did on the left, for which reason I had this year a great many 

 more of the black than I had of the white, and they ripened for the season of 



VOL. VI, 3 K 



