100 On the Great Principles either Suggested 



It may be mentioned, as a proof of that admirable caution 

 which he evinced with regard to facts, even when tempted 

 by the support they would have yielded to any of those in- 

 genious speculations with which his mind was ever teeming, 

 that although he was understood to have continued the me- 

 teorological researches alluded to during the whole period of 

 the visitation of the cholera in 1832, he delayed their publi- 

 cation until they could be still further corroborated. Unfor- 

 tunately, when the cholera broke out a second time, in 1848, 

 his health was too much enfeebled to allow of his undertaking, 

 in addition to a large medical practice, a similar course of 

 laborious investigations, so as to satisfy his own scrupulous 

 mind as to their truth. 



Dr Prout also suggested an explanation of the differences 

 existing between those organic bodies, whose constituents 

 had appeared identical, by the interference of infinitesimal 

 portions of certain extraneous substances intermixed with 

 their predominant ingredients ; and started the idea, which 

 Liebig has followed up with so much success, that these 

 latter may be of essential use, inasmuch as they render the 

 body itself suitable to be assimilated by animals, owing to 

 their counteracting in it those chemical affinities between its 

 particles which would otherwise be too powerful for the 

 antagonistic forces of life to surmount. 



Substances so constituted he called mer organised, and the 

 introduction of these foreign matters he regarded as the 

 cause of that new arrangement of their particles which im- 

 parted to them properties altogether distinct from those 

 which before characterised them. Thus, starch he regarded 

 as merorganised sugar, and considered the latter body to be 

 incapable of assimilation, until it had undergone an altera- 

 tion of this kind within the body. 



Dr Prout also led the way towards the establishment of 

 that beautiful classification of substances subservient to 

 nutrition which Baron Liebig has lately brought so promi- 

 nently forward, and made the foundation of so many striking 

 and interesting speculations. His paper " On the Ultimate 

 Composition of Simple Alimentary Bodies" shews that they 

 are divisible into three kinds, namely, the saccharine, the 



