the dynamic phenomena which the remedies had succeeded in dissipating. It is always, therefore, with evacuations of blood that the antiphlogistic treatment of acute affections of the eye should commence, if attended with plethora. A hypersthenic disease may exist without this last circumstance, and then bleeding would be useless, if not hurtful; such is the case in certain scrofulous, chlorotic, and syphilitic diseases of the eye.

In these circumstances, the disease resists bleeding, although its nature is one of excitation, and it often yields, as if by enchantment, under the influence of direct hyposthenisants, as iodine, iron, mercury, secale cornutum, nitrate of potass, &c. It is easy to understand, then, how bloodletting, which in general is useful in inflammatory diseases, may prove inefficacious in certain inflammations, without the aid of certain direct hyposthenisants. Purulent ophthalmia, retinitis, iritis, choroiditis, are examples. In such cases, it is a common practice to prescribe hyposthenisants in large doses immediately after bleeding, which does not prevent a recurrence several times to this remedy, if needs be. The remedies in question answer so much the better after bloodletting, that they keep up, prolong, and augment its good effects.

Such are our author's views respecting antiphlogistics, or hyposthenisants. 3. Theoretically, by revulsion is understood an artificial action on some point more or less remote from the part diseased, with the view of displacing or causing the disappearance of the disease. This action consists sometimes in an artificial disease, such as a burn with a red-hot iron, boiling water, the potential cautery, a blister, urtication, an eruptive ointment, &c.; sometimes in the use of medicines called evacuants, and of which the object is to promote secretions, or to draw off a quantity, more or less copious, of the animal fluids. The meaning of all this is, that we can, by the aid of those means, displace a disease-make it pass from the inside to the outside, from the upper regions of the body to the lower, from the lungs to the skin of the arm or leg, from the head to the intestines, from the eyes to the nape or the arms.

Dr. Rognetta remarks, that a slight reflection will show that, in principle, the mode of reasoning is no other than that of the humoral pathology. He rejects, then, the revulsive theory, and ridicules with justice the notion of revulsive bloodlettings, while he admits the utility of bloodletting as a mechanical means, diminishing the quantity of blood, and, as a dynamical, its indirect action being to diminish the stimulus of the circulation. Neither has he any greater respect for derivatives, such as cupping, the warm bath, rubefacients and vesicatories, as derivatives. Cupping acts exactly as venesection, the warm bath deprives the body of part of its caloric, while blisters act, he thinks, by being absorbed. Locally, he says, the action of a blister is insignificant. But the cantharides are absorbed, they act on the dynamism of the disordered organ, they hyposthenize it, and hence the antiphlogistic effect.-Dr. Rognetta holds, that an issue does not act by revulsion. But the continued loss of blood by means of the purulent discharge, weakens the system, and produces a hyposthenizing effect. Purgatives, according to our author, act only by being absorbed, and benefit not so much by their effect as evacuants as by their directly sedative influence. That they will act by being absorbed, as when castor oil is rubbed into the skin, we do not deny, but we conceive it to be beyond a

doubt that they purge, not merely from their being taken up from the bowels and conveyed into the tide of the blood, but from their immediate action on the intestinal mucous membrane, and hence on the muscular coat. 4. Dr. Rognetta includes all medical applications made to the eyes themselves under the name of collyria, and staggers us at the outset by advancing the dogma, that all of them act only by being absorbed, exactly as medicines do when applied to the internal surface of the stomach. Some of them, however, he admits to act mechanically, or even chemically, such as cold water, compression, caustics. Always, and even in the cases now referred to, a dynamic effect is to be recognized; for potential caustics do not limit their effects to mere burning, but are partly absorbed, and act dynamically. Even cold water, while it subtracts heat, determines a dynamic effect. From these data, he draws the conclusion, that the efficaciousness of a collyrium is in proportion to its being absorbed, or passing into the circulation of the eye.

The doctor exclaims against combining a number of ingredients together in a collyrium, probably of opposite medicinal characters, or which upon being combined produce something opposite in the effects from what is intended. He instances sulphate of zinc and opium, acetate of lead and camphorated spirit of wine, acetic acid and spirit of wine, which being combinations of stimulants and sedatives, produce compounds whose actions are either null, or opposed to what is intended. We perfectly agree with Dr. Rognetta, that collyria should be as simple as possible. He arranges collyria under six heads: viz. 1, gaseous; 2, fluid; 3, soft or unctuous; 4, dry or pulverulent; 5, metallic, which contain either silver, mercury, copper, lead, zinc, alum, hydrocyanic acid, nitre, or common salt; 6, vegetable and animal. What hydrocyanic acid has to do among the metals we cannot divine.

Along with many useful hints in his discussion of these various local applications to the eyes, we encounter not a few prejudices and absurdities; such as, that a warm collyrium will do harm in the greater number of cases that the application of fluid collyria by means of a camel-hair pencil is painful, from the mechanical effect of the instrument—and that a better way is to cover the finger with a bit of rag, dip it into the collyrium, carry it gently along the inside of the eyelids, and then leaving the rag between the eyelids and in contact with the eye!

With respect to the metallic collyria, he recommends them to be used in the fluid forms, and very weak, so that they may be the more readily absorbed. For instance, he limits the collyrium of nitrate of silver to three or four grains of the salt in an ounce of water, but recommends chiefly from one to three grains, the solution being used as a fomentation. In this degree of strength, he asserts it is absorbed by the eye, and by this means acts beneficially, not in mere conjunctivitis only, but in diseases of the choroid, and even of the retina. In chronic ophthalmia, his practice is, to agitate a stick of lunar caustic for a few instants in a basin of water, till it becomes a little turbid, and to let the patient use this as a lotion for the eyes and face with a sponge. He states this to be attended with great advantage. In like manner with regard to sulphate of copper in cases of chronic blepharitis, he pours a few drops of a concentrated solution of it into a basin of water, and with this directs the patient to bathe the eyelids

and the face, morning and evening, thus employing a sort of mineral water, the quantity of which makes up for the weakness of the saline ingredient. The absorption of it, the doctor thinks, is therefore easily effected, while if strong, it could not be tolerated, and could do no good. The weak solutions act upon all the vessels of the face, contributing to the vascularity of the eyelids and conjunctiva, and prove highly beneficial.

Dr. Rognetta, on the whole, seems well acquainted with chemistry; but sometimes makes a slip, as when he tells us, (p. 41,) that in blue ointment the mercury is oxidized. He might have learned long ago from Orfila, that it is merely mechanically subdivided, with scarcely a trace of oxide.

Corrosive sublimate, he recommends, not only in solution, but in salve, one part of the salt to be dissolved in distilled water and mixed with sixteen parts of fatty matter. This, we conceive, would be too irritating to be applied to the eye.

It is somewhat surprising, that Dr. Rognetta does not seem to be aware of the danger of using saturnine applications to the eyes.

He recommends highly as a collyrium, or drop for the eye, a mixture of equal parts of a saturated solution of alum, and a saturated solution of sulphate of zinc. This, it seems, has succeeded well in the hands of M. ClotBey, in the treatment of purulent ophthalmia in Egypt.

A bread and milk poultice, moistened on the surface with a strong solution of nitre, is highly recommended by Dr. Rognetta as a sedative in cases of ophthalmia, attended with pain and heat.

We regret he seems so little aware of the admirable effects of belladonna, employed in the form of a collyrium, doing little more than naming it along with the other vegetable substances. In our experience, few cases of scrofulous ophthalmia have resisted the careful use of a belladonna collyrium, and in many other varieties of inflammation of the eyes it proves scarcely less useful.

We have thus given a pretty full account of Dr. Rognetta's therapeutical principles, because, as we have already hinted, it is in these, much more than in his description of diseases, that his work differs from other ophthalmological treatises. Were we called upon to sum up in a few general conclusions the substance of his therapeutics, we fear one of these conclusions would be this, that in eye-practice, not less than in the treatment of other organs, many many remedies, of the action of which we know nothing, are every day employed against diseases, the nature of which is equally unknown. This is a truth which, however humiliating, should never damp in the smallest degree the zeal of the honest and observant practitioner of the healing art. The modus operandi of medicines is almost wholly unknown-the fact of their being beneficial in many cases cannot be a matter of doubt to any man the eyes of whose understanding are opened, and blinded neither by prejudice nor self-conceit. To throw medicines aside because we cannot explain the mode in which they act, would be the height of folly, and almost as foolish is the attempt to arrange them within a very limited number of artificial divisions, such as those adopted by the author before us. We should much rather have no classification of remedies at all than that which arranges them into the two divisions of excitants and sedatives. We should much rather call quina a specific, mereury a specific, sulphur a specific, iodine a specific, for the several diseases.

which these remedies are known to cure, because we should thereby declare a fact, which we should not do by calling any of them an excitant or a sedative.

What is the grand practical result of the revolution in the classification of remedies, attempted by Giacomini? Almost nothing. We find Dr. Rognetta raising his voice against putting a little alcohol into a lead collyrium, because, forsooth, the alcohol is a stimulant, and would undo the sedative effect of the lead-or of combining opium with calomel, in iritis, because the hypersthenisant properties of the opium would counteract the hypersthenisant ones of the calomel. But this is all. The same remedies essentially are employed by our author as are used by other practitioners, or if his new therapeutics lead him to any practice very different from the common, it is to some such absurdity as attempting to cure iritis and other internal ophthalmiæ by atropism, (p. 242,) that is to say, by poisoning the patient with belladonna-a prank supremely useless, even when it does not prove dangerous.

The division of all diseases into sthenic and asthenic, and of all remedies into hypersthenisant and hyposthenisant, is absurd, and fit to take its place only in the childish brain of some quixotical water-curer, who, holding "the leading paramount indication in the treatment of any given disease, to be either to depress excited action, or to exalt depressed action," tells us, that "one single remedy, capable of being graduated in its doses, so as to exercise every degree of sedation or stimulation respectively, is calculated, under favorable circumstances, to operate against the whole host of maladies, and to supersede, or be backed against, the whole list of medicines,' which remedy is water.

Barring his theoretical notions about the action of remedies, we can scarcely give Dr. Rognetta too much credit for his book, which, as we stated at the outset, is both well written, and rich in characteristic descriptions of disease, full of valuable facts, and rendered interesting by the reasonings of an acute and lively mind. With one short extract, explanatory of Dr. Rognetta's mode of regarding some of the most important disorders of the eye, we shall take our leave of him.

"The apparatus of vision may be considered as a direct emanation, a prolongation of the brain. In an anatomical point of view, the eye is, in fact, a sort of little brain. Like the encephalon, it presents a protecting osseous case (orbit), completed by a fibro-membranous apparatus (eyelids). Like the brain, it has a fibrous envelop (sclerotica), another which is vascular and serous (choroid), and lastly, an essential organic part, which is medullary or nervous (retina). Let us observe this portion of the cerebral substance, which is continued within the sheath of the optic nerve, and expands over the bottom of the eye; this considerable artery, which penetrates it (arteria centralis), and which imitates the basilar artery of the brain; this prodigious quantity of nerves which surround the eye, and the branches of which enter into its interior; and, lastly, this magnificent tree of arterial vessels, which bathe with blood the eye, the orbit, and all the neighbouring parts, as the carotid does the parts to which it is distributed; all this leads naturally to the conclusion, that one of the principal sources of the diseases of the eye is in the brain itself, or at least in the constituent elements of the eye, coming from the interior of the cranium. Thus it is that I see, in a great number of these diseases, affections depending on a certain morbid state of the encephalon, and I can every day congratulate myself on the practical results accruing from this manner of contemplating my subject." (p. 1.)

Balbirnie's Philosophy of the Water-Cure, p. 100.

ART. XII.

A View of the Formation, Discipline, and Economy of Armies. By the late ROBERT JACKSON, M.D., Inspector-General of Army Hospitals. The third edition, revised, with a Memoir of his Life and Services, drawn up from his own papers and the communications of his survivors. London, 1845. 8vo, pp. 560.

THE volume before us consists of two parts, the first being a Memoir of Dr. Jackson; and the second, a new edition, his work on the Formation, Discipline, and Economy of Armies. We shall notice them in order.

ROBERT JACKSON was one of a large class of men of whom Scotland has just reason to be proud, and who themselves have yet greater reason to be proud of Scotland-men who, by the strength of their native intellect and the goodness of their moral qualities, have, under the fostering care of their country's institutions, raised themselves from poverty and low estate to a high, dignified, and influential position in society, where they were enabled to do infinitely more good to their fellow-men and their native land, and to enjoy more personal happiness than could possibly have been their fortune in the station in which they were born. It is only in this increased capacity of doing good to others, as well as of augmenting the stock of individual happiness, that we see any benefit in the raising or being raised from a low to an elevated station; as we cannot regard anything as intrinsically and absolutely superior or inferior in either one or the other, or in the occupiers thereof-feeling and acknowledging with the mightiest of Scotland's low-born great, that

"The rank is but the guinea's stamp,

The man's the gowd for a' that."

And it is only in the departments of literature and science, or in the professions based upon these, that the full worth of the Scottish character and the peculiar excellence of Scottish institutions can be truly manifested. In commerce and the arts, ordinary industry and prudence, together with a favorable concurrence of circumstances, may and do raise men in all countries from humble poverty to wealth and distinction, with very little aid from letters, and without any very extraordinary personal exertions. And this takes place nearly as often in England as in Scotland. But with a few very remarkable exceptions, we shall look in vain in the learned professions for Englishmen who have reached the highest posts and honours from the very lowest stations of society. The case is, however, very different with Scotsmen; as we believe it will be found that many of the most distinguished and estimable members of the learned professions, more especially of the medical profession, have sprung from the humblest grades of life, from the low but not unenlightened abodes of the small farmer, the artisan, or even the cottar. And the causes of the difference are sufficiently obvious. They lie, partly, in difference of national character-particularly in that noble ambition of every Scottish father to raise his son above himself-but chiefly in the difference of the educational establishments of the two countries. The existence in every parish, or at least in every small district, of a good school for teaching not merely the rudiments of ordinary knowledge but the classics, and at a