A philosophical and statistical history of the inventions and customes of ancient and modern nations in the manufacture and use of inebriating liquors : with the present practice of distillation in all its varieties: together with an extensive illustration of the consumption and effects of opium, and other stimulants used in the East, as substitutes for wine and spirits / By Samuel Morewood.

  • Morewood, Samuel.
Date:
1838
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A philosophical and statistical history of the inventions and customes of ancient and modern nations in the manufacture and use of inebriating liquors : with the present practice of distillation in all its varieties: together with an extensive illustration of the consumption and effects of opium, and other stimulants used in the East, as substitutes for wine and spirits / By Samuel Morewood. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

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    Dioseorides, who was physician to Cleopatra, and contemporary with Pliny, was obliged to collect essential oil on the fleece of a sheep, a proof that he knew no other mode of distillation. One hundred and thirty one years subsequent to this, Galen, a celebrated physician of Pergamus, Avho wrote many books not only upon medical, but philo- sophical subjects, speaks of distillation per descensum, but it is conceived he meant nothing more by this than what regarded the melting of metals. Faber,* a writer in alchymy of some eminence, states that the art of distillation was known to Democritus, who was contemporary with Hippocrates, primus enim inter Grsecos distillandi peritus fuit De- mocritus distillationis autem peritiam didicit in Egypto, and that alchymy flourished in the time of Hermes Trismegistus, in Egypt, about A. M. 2434. He admits that neither Hippocrates nor Galen knew any thing of distillation ; yet it appears extraordinary, that the most enlightened people on the earth should have remained ignorant of this art, 561 years after Democritus, unless it was kept a secret by him as well as by the Egyptians In the 12th chapter and 20th verse of St. Paul's epistle to the Romans, there is a metephorical allusion to the same practice, which is thus beautifully expressed by Parnell:— So artists melt the sullen ore of lead, By heaping coals of fire upon its head ; In the kind warmth the metals learn to glow, And free from dross the silver runs below. In like manner, Caligula, according to Pliny, endeavom-ed to collect, by sublimation, gold from orpiment, a mineral substance found in diffe- rent parts of the world.f Theophrastus and Dioseorides also describe the extraction of tar as effected by a similar-process ; and it is strange, that the same mode of obtaining it is still followed by the people of the northern provinces of Sweden. During the reign of Dioclesian, who succeded Marcus Aurelius Numerianus, in the year 284, we find the Egyptians had carried their speculations in chemistry so far as to induce that emperor to publish an edict for the suppression of all the ancient books that treated of the art of making gold and silver, and which he wantonly committed to the flames, being fearful, that if they became wealthy, they would be induced to resist the Roman yoke, and set him at defiance.J But Falter wrote in Ki27, and his works were printed at Strasburg in 1G32. f Pliny, b. xxxiii. cap. 4. % Vide Suidas in voce ^-yjuiict, Gibbon, vol. ii. p. 137.