4lt) PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS. [aNNO J 730. 



fore where the recruits are plentiful, the evacuations will be equally so; and 

 where those are sparing, the evacuations are small; or where the balance is cast 

 too much on either side, some indisposition or distemper must follow. There 

 is no exception from this rule but in children, a part of whose nourishment 

 goes to accretion, and the increase of their weight ; therefore in the case before 

 us, the recruit being entirely abstracted, the evacuations must have been little or 

 next to nothing; and therefore the quantity of the blood and circulating hu- 

 mours would remain much the same, and keep up the fullness, strength, and 

 equality of the pulse for several days, till the critical putrefaction and colliqua- 

 tion of the blood abovementioned, on the 5th or 6th day, rendered it unfit for 

 a regular circulation, and produced intermissions in the pulse, retchings to 

 vomit, and hickup, all of them being local convulsions, and the effects of 

 corruption, acrimony, irritation, and an unequal distribution of the fluids, 

 which terminated in death the beginning of the 7th day. 



The sum of what has been said is, that in this case very little, if any, bile 

 entered into the intestines, and that ineffectual; and none at all into the blood. 

 And as there was no apparent defect in any part of the body, nor any wound 

 that could have been either dangerous or deadly, in any other respect than as it 

 gave occasion to the loss and misplacing of the gall; it is therefore evident, 

 that all the symptoms, and the patient's death, were entirely owing to the loss 

 of this useful juice, which it seems is so necessary to all parts of the animal 

 economy, natural, vital, and animal, that this person could not live above t) 

 days without it. 



The practical inferences that seem to flow by necessary consequences from 

 this observation, are, 1. That the peristaltic motion of the intestines, is as 

 much owing to the influx of the bile into their cavity, as to the influx of the 

 animal spirits and blood into their sides ; and therefore that the bile is to be con- 

 sidered as one of the prime movers in the animal economy, by which the elastic 

 springs of the natural motions, viz. the muscular fibres of the guts, are set to 

 work; on whose motion all the subsequent vital and animal motions so far de- 

 pend, that none of them can be long in perfection where it is imperfect, nor 

 subsist many days where it is totally wanting. 



2. This prime motion is totally lost, by a total want of bile, or when it proves 

 sluggish by a defect in its quantity, or becomes irregular or convulsive by a great 

 redundancy or morbid acrimony in it. From wlience several distempers that 

 are called nervous may arise, and are more likely to be cured by correcting and 

 evacuating the redundant or faulty bile, and disobstructing the liver, than by 

 most other medicines taken from the common class of nervines. 



3. That the power of purgatives depends on the co-operation of the bile; 



