Page:Babell, a satirical poem (1830).djvu/18

tiary opinion, and has given sufficient hints, by which secretion and nutrition may be explained. He has banished materiæ subtiles, occult qualities, and such other gibberish, and has shewn that acids and alkalies, as such, cure no diseases. He has demonstrated the evacuations proper in fevers, by exact calculation. He has explained vision, and demonstrated the nature and diseases of the eye, and their causes. To be short, he has joined the Physician and Mathematician so happily together, that he has given us in a manner, an œconomia animalis, at least he has explained and demonstrated the most difficult and most considerable things in œconomia animalis, that his dissertations are so far the only solid institutions of Medicine we now have. Neither were these idle speculations and vain amusements, for he founded on them a rational practice, which he had so universally here for many years, and performed with so great judgment and success, that even these Physicians who had no good will at him were forced to acknowledge his inventions, and follow his method in curing diseases, which is the best now known in any part of the world, being short and proper, and free from the idle pomp and unnecessaiy farrago of too many drugs.

"The calumny of Atheism objected against him by fanatical and enthusiastical spirits, who brand both good and learned men with this odious name, that cannot come up to their ridiculous opinions and notions, is absurd and false; for no man believed more firmly the existence of a God, and demonstrated it more clearly, as may be seen in his dissertation, De circulatione sanguinis in animalibus genitis et nan genitis, in which he has proved against Des Cartes