VOL. XLVH.] PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS. 223 



the deception, being taken for strictures and carnosities : but if he had drawn 

 this general inference, that of all the urethras, where these strictures and car- 

 nosities are thought to be found, not one has any thing in them, he should have 

 been deceived, and would now make his recantation. 



One of his boarders preparing to perform the operation of cutting on the dead 

 body of a bachelor, aged 45, the sound could not pass ; the pupil forced, and 

 made a false passage. Mr. le Cat opened this canal, and found, 1st, that a 

 simple small stile could not pass into the urethra, by pushing it from the glans 

 towards the prostate ; but that it passed, by pushing it from the prostate towards 

 the glans ; 2dly, a little before the place, where the bulb becomes less thick, 

 and begins to surround the urethra, that is, about a large finger's breadth from 

 its beginning, there was a stricture entirely like that which Dr. Willis discovered 

 in the upper longitudinal sinus of the dura mater ; 3dly, some few lines lower 

 down was a caruncle, or a fleshy firm bump, of the size of a pea ; and below this 

 bump, the urethra was extremely straightened ; 4thly, the basis of this camosity 

 formed a kind of valve, and there he found the false passage, that went into the 

 substance of the bulb. 



LII. On the Effects of Lightning at South-Moullon in Devonshire. By Joseph 



Palmer, Esq. p. 330. 



On Thursday June 6, 1751, about 3 o'clock in the afternoon, (that day, and 

 some others before, having been extremely hot and sultry, and the wind pretty 

 strong in the south-east) a flash of lightning, attended with an uncommon 

 thunder-clap, which immediately followed or rather accompanied it, fell on the 

 windows and walls of the church and steeple of South-Moulton in Devon, 

 greatly damaging them. Many stones in the walls, &c. were broken and splin- 

 tered in an extraordinary manner ; also much damage done to the bells and iron 

 spindles, and the church clock stopped. In the adjoining fields the ground was 

 much torn up, as if ploughed, and an oblique hole made of about 3 feet deep. 



LIIL An Improvement of the Bills of Mortality. By Mr. J. Dodson.* p. 333. 



There has lately been a scheme proposed for amending the form of the bills of 

 mortality of London, in a pamphlet called " Observations on the Past Growth 

 and Present Stite of London," by Mr. Corby n Morris, who has enumerated 

 many excellent purposes to which it may be applied, but has omitted to mention 



* Mr. Dodson was an ingenious and very industrious mathematician, and the autlior of several use- 

 ful books ; but we have found few or no particulars of his life. He was some time master of the 

 Royal Mathematical School in Christ's Hospital, London. His publications chiefly were, 1. Anti- 

 logarithmic Canon, folio, 1742. 2. The Calculator, a collection of useful tables, large 8vo, 174.7. 

 3. Mathematical Repository, being a collection of analytical questions and solutions, in 3 vols. Svo,, 

 Ann. 1748, 1753, 1755. 



