586 M E A 
M E A 
which are fit for ufe, and they manufafiture a variety of 
toys and trinkets. In a word, there is no kind of com¬ 
modity which may not be procured at Meaco, nor any 
kind of workman (hip which its artifts will not imitate. 
Lat. 35. 24. N. Ion. 153. 30. E. 
ME'ACOCK,/! An uxorious or effeminate man.—A 
woman’s well help’d up with fuch a meacock. Dehker's 
llonejl Whore. 
ME'ACOCK, ad], Tame; timorous; cowardly: 
’Tis a world to fee. 
How tame, when men and women are alone, 
A meacock wretch can make the cu rife ft threw. S'lakefp, 
MEAD, f. [maebo, Sax. meethe , Dut. meth, Ger. hydro- 
meli, Lat.] A kind of drink made of water and honey.— 
Though not fo folutive a drink as mead, yet it will be 
more grateful to the ftomach. Bacon . 
He fheers his over-burden’d (keep : 
Or mead for cooling drink prepares. 
Of virgin honey in the jars. Drydex. 
One of the heft methods of preparing mead is as fol¬ 
lows : Into twelve gallons of water put the whites of fix 
eggs; mixing thefe well together, and to the mixture 
adding twenty pounds of honey. Let the liquor boil an 
hour; then add cinnamon, ginger, cloves, mace, and rofe- 
mary. As foon as it is cold, put a fpoonful of ye£t to it, 
and tun it up, keeping the veffel filled as it works ; 
when it has done working, Hop it up clofe ; and, when 
fine, bottle it off for ufe. 
Thorlej' fays, that mead not inferior to the beffc of fo¬ 
reign wines may be made in the following manner: Put 
three pounds of the fined: honey to one gallon of water, 
and two lemon-peels to each gallon; boil it half an hour, 
well feummed ; then put in, while boiling, lemon-peel: 
work it with yefl; then put it in your veffel with the 
peel, to (land five or fix months, and bottle it off for ufe. 
If it is to be kept for feveral years, put four pounds of 
honey to a gallon of water. 
Macquer, in his Dictionary of Chemifiry, directs to 
choofe the whited, pured, and bed-taded, honey, and to 
put it into a kettle with more than its weight of water: 
a part of this liquor mud be evaporated by boiling, and 
the liquor feummed, till its confidence is. fuch, that a 
frefh egg (hall be fupported on its furface without finking 
more than half its thicknefs into the liquor; then the li¬ 
quor is to be drained, and poured through a funnel into 
a barrel; this barrel, which ought to be nearly full, mud 
be expofed to a heat as equable as poffible, from 20 to 27 
or 28 degrees of Reaumur’s thermometer, taking care 
that the bung-hole be (lightly covered, but not clofed. 
The phenomena of the fpirituous fermentation will appear 
in this liquor, and will fubfid for two or three months, 
according to the degree of heat; after which they will 
diminifh and ceafe. During this fermentation, the barrel 
mud be filled up occafionally with more of the fame kind 
of liquor of honey, fome of which ought to be kept apart, 
on purpofe to replace the liquor which flows out of the 
barrel in froth. When the fermentation ceafes, and the 
liquor has become very vinous, the barrel is then to be 
put into a cellar, and well clofed ; a year afterwards the 
mead will be fit to be put into bottles. 
Mead is a liquor of very ancient ufe in Britain ; and it 
feems probable, that, before the introduction of agricul¬ 
ture into this ifland, mead, or honey diluted with water, 
was the only ftrong liquor known to its inhabitants, as 
it was to many other ancient nations in the fame circum- 
llances. This continued to be a favourite beverage 
among the ancient Britons and their poderity long after 
they had become acquainted with other liquors. The 
mead-maker was the eleventh perfon in dignity in the 
courts of the ancient princes of Wales, and took place of 
the phyfician. The following ancient law of that princi¬ 
pality lhows how much this liquor was edeemed by the 
Britifh princes; <( There are three things in the court 
which mud becommunicated to the king before they are 
made known to any other perfon : 1. Every fentence of 
the judge; 2. Every new fong ; and, 3. Every cafk of 
mead.” This was perhaps the liquor which is called by 
Ollian the joy and drength of fhells, with which his he¬ 
roes were fo much delighted. After the introduction of 
agriculture, ale or beer became the mod general drink of 
all the Britifh nations who praCtifed that art, as it had 
long been of all the Celtic people on the continent. See 
Ale, vol. i. 
MEAD, or Mead'ow,A [maths, Sax.] Ground fome- 
what watery, not ploughed, but covered with grafs and 
flowers .—Mead is a word chiefly poetical: 
Paints her, ’tis true, with the fame hand which fpreads 
Like glorious colours through the flow’ry meads, 
When lavifh Nature with her bed attire 
Cloaths the gay fpring, the feafon of defire. Waller. 
Yet ere to-morrow’s fun fliall (how his head. 
The dewy paths of meadows we will tread. 
For crowns and chaplets to adorn thy bed. Dryden. 
MEAD (Richard), a very eminent phyfician, was born 
in Augud 1673, at Stepney ; of which parifli his father, 
the Rev. Matthew {Head, a Prefbyterian, was one of the 
two miniders ; but had been ejeCled, for non-conformity, 
in the year 1662. As he had a handfome patrimony, be¬ 
ing descended from a confiderable family in Buckingham- 
fhire, he continued to refide in the parifli, (preaching to a 
numerous congregation of diflenters,) and bedowed a li¬ 
beral education on his large family, under a private tutor 
at home. This little domeltic fchool, however, w r as broken 
up in 1683, when Mr. Mead, having been accufed of par¬ 
ticipating in a plot againd government, thought proper 
to retire to Holland, leaving Richard, his eleventh child, 
under the care of Mr. Singleton, an able claflical fcholar, 
who had been ejeCled from the office of fecond mailer of 
Eton fchool as a non-conformid. Richard made great 
progrefs in his claflical dudies, which he proceeded to 
finifh at Utrecht, under the learned Grsevius, in 1689. 
After a refidence of three years at that place, he deter¬ 
mined upon the ftudy of phyfic, and went to Leyden, 
where he attended the leclures of Herman on botany, and 
of Pitcairn on the theory and praflice of medicine. He 
received much friendly attention from the latter, from 
whom he imbibed the mathematical principles of that fei- 
ence, which were prevalent in his early writings. He 
then commenced his travels ; and vifited the principal 
cities of Italy, where he graduated in philofophy and phy¬ 
fic, at Padua, in Augud 1695. On his return to England 
in 1696, he fettled in the very houfe in which he was 
born, and praHifed his profeflion for feveral years with 
confiderable fuccefs; and, in 1699, he married the daugh¬ 
ter of a merchant in London. His fird publication, en¬ 
titled “ A Mechanical Account of Poifons,” which con¬ 
tained the refult of many experiments, made with the poi- 
fon of the viper, &c. appeared in 1702, and gained him 
confiderable credit. In fubfequent editions, however, he 
candidly retraced fome points of his mechanical theory, 
which more mature obfervation convinced him was in¬ 
adequate to explain the funHions of a living body. Soon 
after the publication of this treatife, he was elected a mem¬ 
ber of the Royal Society, of which he was afterwards ap¬ 
pointed one of the vice-prefidents by fir Ifaac Newton. 
In 1703, he was chofen phyfician to St. Thomas’s Hofpi- 
tal, when he took up his refidence in Crutched Friars. 
In 1704, he publifhed his treatife “ De Imperio Solis et 
Lunse in Corpore humano, et Morbis inde oriundis,” 8vo. 
Phyficians have always been prone to apply the fafhionable 
philofophy of their day to the explanation of the pheno¬ 
mena of the animal economy ; and in this eflay, Mead 
built his reafoning on the theory of attraftion, which 
Newton had promulgated, attempting to (how that perio¬ 
dical influences were produced on the living body, as 
upon the tides of the Ca and the atmolphere. In 1707, 
he received the diploma of M.D. from the univerfity of 
Oxford, 
