ternal medicines are ufed; inflammation, convulfions, and death, enfue; and the evil dæmon is execrated for the fins of the unfkilful phyfician. The poverty of their diet, especially of the inferior claffes, while it preferves them from inflammatory diseases, induces those of a very different kind. The violent purgatives to which they constantly refort in all illness, from fuppofed obftructions, increase the malady, and the carcafe of the putrid patient ejects worms upwards and downwards; his fkin burns; his eyes are fparkling and humid; his tongue is torrid and often fplit; he grows delirious, and dies.

All the fpecies of fluxes before described, with their concomitant fymptoms, are enumerated by this author, with the addition of one of a fort more than ufually fatal, which happened while he was in India, and carried off above fixty thousand people in Pondicherry and its neighbourhood.* He imputes it to perfpiration fuddenly obftructed by one or other of the thousand causes that fo frequently produce it in India, by habits of reli

Sopnerat, vol. ii p. 142.

gion, fleeping in the open air, meagre nutriment, ablution in cold water after eating or exercife, &c. &c.

The quantity of butter eaten with his rice, by the abftemious Brahmin, not unfrequently brings on indigeftions which terminate in fudden death; on the other hand, those casts which regale on meat, a nourishment too heavy for fo hot a climate, are often the victims of indigeftion, called in India mort de chien.

Some inflammatory fevers they have which are cured by diet-drinks made of the pounded root of the margofier, something similar to our bark, and preferred by them to that imported by us. The gout cannot be fuppofed common among them; but, when it attacks them, it is cured by the ufe of a powder in which brimstone is the principal ingredient. In the part of India, where our author refided, they cure the bite of the Cobra by an application known to Europeans by the name of Ointment of Madura, and likely enough to have been one of their oldest specifics. against its poison. It is a mixture of different herbs and roots containing a great quantity of volatile alkali, and the principal ingreVOL, VII.

P

dient

dient in it is the kernel of the pine-apple tree. It is a violent purgative, and emits a fœtid odour like human excrement. They rub a portion into the wound, and make the patient swallow another portion. If early applied, it generally proves efficacious.*

Such is the extraordinary, but authentic, portrait of the medical practice of the Brahmins. I have entered as extensively into the fubject as poffible, because it is a very interesting one to European practitioners. We fhall now attend to their CHEMISTRY, which will lead us a few steps farther in the inquiry; though to what extent they applied the preparations of the feveral metals to me dicinal purposes can never be known, till their oldest Sanfcreet treatifes fhall have been tranflated.

CHEMISTRY.

Those who, from the earliest periods, have been devoted to a fuperftitious veneration of the element of FIRE, those who gave to their

Sonnerat, vol. ii. p. 153.

pagodas

pagodas the form of pyramids and cones, to imitate the folar beam, and on whofe altars a facred flame for ever blazed, could fcarcely fail of being intimately acquainted with its wonderful properties, which in fact were the fource of that admiration and reverence. It was their acquaintance with its active pervading principle and energy which induced them to idolize FIRE as the foul of the material world; its hallowed beam, their phyfical theology taught them, emaning from the folar orb, firft gave animation and motion to univerfal nature; and, from fome mutilated tradition of a better theology, they regarded fire as the great CHEMIST that was finally to diffolve the univerfe and reduce it to ashes. In fact, they conceived the orbs of heaven to be formed of a kind of ætherial fire, and that they floated in a circumambient luminous fluid, which they confidered as a fifth element, and denominated the AKASS. I have had frequent occafion to obferve that their fuperftitious veneration for this element probably commenced, during their refidence in Chaldæa, with the first corruption of the pure patriarchal theology; and, according to the Indian

U 2

1

Indian hiftory,* devout pilgrims, as well in memorial of their origin as of this their primæval devotion, ftill refort to Hierapolis in Syria, and pay their devotions at the two JWALA-MUCHIS, or Springs of Naptha, the one not far from the banks of the Tigris, the other on the flaming plain of Baku, on the borders of the distant Caspian Sea, where the priests of the fun watched night and day the never-dying flame, fuppofed to have been kindled by his own ray.

Of the powerful agency of FIRE, the Afiatics could fcarcely avoid entertaining the most awful conceptions, fince its tremendous effects were often too distinctly visible in that torrid climate, where the broad flashes of the tropical lightning fired their loftieft forefts, and the globe of electric flame levelled their proudest temples with the duft. They also saw it in the bursting volcano that shook to the centre their mountains of broadeft base, and filled whole provinces with desolation and dismay.

Obferving with anxious and fearful attention the wonderful operations of nature by

Mr. Wilford on Egypt and the Nile, in Afiatic Researches, vol. iii. p. 297.

the