A treatise concerning the influence of the sun and moon upon human bodies, and the diseases thereby produced / by Richard Mead ... ; Translated from the Latin, under the author's inspection, by Thomas Stack.

Richard Mead

Date:: 1748

Credit: A treatise concerning the influence of the sun and moon upon human bodies, and the diseases thereby produced / by Richard Mead ... ; Translated from the Latin, under the author's inspection, by Thomas Stack. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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$This matter thus far explained, it will not be improper to fubjoin the folution of a difficult queftion, which has raifed great contention among philofophers: viz. whereas water is more than eight hundred times heavier than air, how does it happen, that the latter, when replete with watery vapors, de- preffes the mercury in the baro¬ meter; fo that its fall is an indi¬ cation of rain? Now this pheno¬ menon feems to me to be chiefly owing to the following caufes. Wa¬ ter is fo entirely void of elafticity, that no force can' comprefs it into a narrower compafs; and at the fame' time, a boiling heat divides it into fuch minute particles, as to make it occupy fourteen thoufand times more fpace, than it naturally takes up {k]. This vapor, more than See DefaguUers^s courfe of experimental fhilofophy^ vqL iu te^t,$