of Edinburgh , Session 1S68-G9. 395 
and country gentlemen of the time, all more or less conversant 
with literary or scientific pursuits, among whom the most con- 
spicuous were Lord-President Dilndas, Lord Justice-Clerk Miller, 
Lords Meadowhank and Glenlee, Barons Montgomery, Norton, and 
Hume, Sir Henry Campbell, Sir James Hall of Dunglass, Sir 
George Clerk Maxwell of Penicuick, Sir Alexander Dick of Preston- 
field, Sir George Mackenzie of Coull, Sir James Hunter Blair of 
Dunskey, Sir William Forbes of Pitsligo, and John Clerk of 
Eldin. 
It will be acknowledged to be difficult to discover in any country, 
and at any period, united in a single association, sixty names more 
remarkable than these for the impression they have made on the 
peaceful part of the history of a nation. 
The medical element of the Society was in those days peculiarly 
rich in great names. This was the element, too, from which the 
Society originally sprung. We should therefore naturally expect 
medicine to flourish in a Society descended from the medical 
essayists of the middle of last century. But medicine makes only 
a rare, and for the most part insignificant appearance in the busi- 
ness of the Royal Society. It is a matter of curiosity, however, to 
see how, even so far down as 1792, when very much smothered by 
literature and pure science, medicine still sometimes cropped out 
in naked simplicitjn Among the early papers read in the Society, 
Dr Hope describes a disagreeable case of death from impaction of 
a gall-stone in the bile-ducts ; Dr Butter of London proclaims hem- 
lock to be a sovereign cure for St Vitus’s dance ; Dr Duncan inti- 
mates that he had cured an inveterate hiccup with a single dose of 
diluted sulphuric acid ; at a later period, Mr James Russell, after- 
wards Professor Russell, a well-known colleague, communicates a 
singular case of hernia, and Dr Francis Home treats of the disease 
Amaurosis. If this be all which medicine could do in its most 
palmy days in Edinburgh to hold up its head in the Royal Society, 
I confess it is not a subject of regret that, by gradual and tacit 
consent, papers on pure medical practice have been allowed to drop 
from our Proceedings. For assuredly there is nothing at all so 
remarkable or peculiarly instructive in death from an impacted 
gall-stone, or from any form of hernia, as to deserve being re- 
