VOL. Xr.IX.J PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS. 6l5 



parts of muscular fibres, but could not perceive an opiate manifestly to compose 

 these spastic motions of the parts, as Haller alleges they do, though in some 

 trials he fancied there were grounds for such a conclusion. However this is no 

 argument against the internal use of opiates, where the solids are greatly irritated. 



He adds one more experiment, made on the intestines of a lamb: after he had 

 taken them from the carcase, he poured diluted spirit of vitriol on them, as well 

 as several other pungent substances; and on the touch of all of them, the intes- 

 tines renewed their contraction, which before had totally ceased, and surprised 

 him with a motion almost as strong as is found in the process of chylification ; 

 and this continued till the external cold had indurated and stiffened the fatty 

 membrane of the omentum. 



These were some of many experiments of a like nature, which the importance 

 of these facts in daily practice of medicine required to ascertain, or reject ; and, 

 from the result of his repeated trials, he was induced to coincide with most 

 of the conclusions drawn by Drs. Haller, Castell, and Zimmerman; that no 

 part is sensible but the nerves only, and that some parts are irritable without 

 sensibility, accompanying them in any great degree; while others are altogether 

 without sense, at the same time that they are incapable of being irritated at all. 



Dr. B. adds, that he had thus communicated to the Royal Society the result 

 of his experiments on this subject. Whether he should, by prosecuting the 

 subject still farther, be able fairly to make out, that irritability, as it is distin- 

 guished from sensibility, depends on a series of nerves different from such as 

 serve either for voluntary motion and sensation, he could not then say. But 

 whatever might be his future conclusions, he would establish nothing hypothe- 

 tical, but endeavour by fair deductions to approach towards truth, as near as the 

 abstruse nature of the subject would permit; and as he thought he had actuaHy 

 found some variation from the common practice in rheumatisms, built on the 

 established fact of great irritability in the muscular fibres, succeed, to the relief 

 of suffering patients, he could not dismiss this subject, without relating, that 

 only with gentle and continued frictions on the pained rheumatic parts with com- 

 mon sallad oil, 2 poor patients, who lately applied for his advice in obstinate 

 rheumatisms, were, by thus relaxing the crispation of the solids, surprisingly 

 relieved, without any further medicine. So that after bleeding, where it is indi- 

 cated, which above all things he found to abate irritability, it might deserve to 

 be tried, how far animal oils, applied by friction long continued to the aggrieved 

 parts, both in the gout, rheumatism, and other painful diseases, would ease the 

 tortures, without repelling or obstructing the matter, which nature is labouring 

 to throw off. But he forbore to enlarge, as the experiments he had hitherto 

 made on the subject of irritability, were scarcely sufficient to obtain what Lord 

 Bacon calls the vindemiatio prima in this science. When he should receive suf- 



