212 NATURE AND LIFE. 



The eighteenth century obediently followed in the sci- 

 ences the impulse given by the preceding age. At that 

 period Borden, with his B6arnese fire and his sparkling 

 genius for medicine, made the use of mineral waters popu- 

 lar, particularly that of the sulphur and thermal springs 

 of the Pyrenees, perhaps the most powerful of all. He 

 recommended them for drinking, and made them famous 

 by the talent with which he cleverly displayed their effects. 

 Great Italian physicians studied the action of quinine 

 very closely. Dating from the seventeenth century, opium 

 gained an extraordinary popularity. The famous Syden- 

 ham, describing the epidemic dysentery of the years from 

 1669 to 1672, exclaims, after describing the preparation 

 of the laudanum which has kept his name : " I cannot re- 

 frain from congratulating the human race that the Omnipo- 

 tent has made it the gift of this remedy, which is apt for a 

 greater number of cases than any other is, and excels all 

 others in efficacy. Without it, the healing art would cease 

 to be." Yet the effects of this remedy called forth long 

 and passionate disputes, with which the name of Brown is 

 connected. This doctor, who lectured at Edinburgh in the 

 middle of the eighteenth century, there taught a theory 

 of the effects of opium, which so carried his scholars away 

 that they set up a statue to him, with these words carved 

 on the pedestal : " Opium, assuredly, does not soothe." 

 Brown indeed vehemently denied the sedative virtues of 

 poppy-juice. He classed it among the stimulants, and, to 

 prove himself in the right, swallowed enormous doses of it 

 at his lectures whenever his fluency flagged. In that same 

 school at Edinburgh, Cullen too was a professor, one of 

 the great physicians of the eighteenth century. To him 

 we owe the discovery of the chief property of digitalis, 

 which is to check the movements of the heart, and conse- 

 quently lessen the rapidity of the pulse. Before this, 

 Withering and Charles Darwin had recognized its diuretic 



