THE LIFE OF THE AUTHOR.

...these times he treated those who wrote something against him quite harshly, as was evident in those things which had happened with de Graaf, Caspar Bartholin, and others. But a more ardent worship of piety toward G O D had softened the man's fierce spirit. He had read certain books which a virgin then celebrated, Antoinette Bourignon, had published: from which he was thereafter most greatly troubled by the care of Christian duty. A flight and hatred of those things which detain men also seized his mind, especially indeed the affections of the soul, and among those, that insatiable ambition by which one always desires to be supreme. For this reason, he wished to extirpate this, the root of many evils, completely. At that time, that virgin was in Holstein, and in her company she had with her Joannes Tielens, of Amsterdam, long known to Swammerdam. He, therefore, desiring to consult the said virgin about those things which troubled him concerning the religion of the soul, wrote on the 18th of March, 1673, to that friend, so that he might wish to insinuate himself into that virgin's favor, and obtain from her permission to write to her regarding those things by which he was tormented. Having obtained this opportunity, he wrote to Bourignon on the 29th of April of the same year, and received a response given by her on the 17th of August. From that time indeed, much changed from who he had been before; he scarcely cared for anything thereafter, except obtaining from G O D the peace of his soul, which he lamented most bitterly had served mere human things until now. He then wrote many letters to Antoinette regarding these things, to which he also had responses. Around the same time, he was the first of mortals, if I am not mistaken, to uncover a matter of supreme importance. For he discovered that hernias in the body of a man, as well as of a woman, never arise from a rupture of the peritoneum. But the peritoneum, being simple, is stretched over the place where the seminal vessels, included in a single sheath, hitherto placed under the peritoneum, recede from the peritoneum toward the scrotum, and there leave the peritoneum. If, however, this peritoneum insinuates itself by chance into that loose path through which the spermatic cord descends to the testicles, pressed by any cause, it forms a blind sac: since this membrane is wonderfully extensible, and because it is easily admitted into that path, which is quite soft. As the same cause persists, it is produced more and more, and once the protrusion original: "Ecphyfis" is born, it continues along the same path, always lying externally against the spermatic cord through the muscles, above the pubic bone, into the scrotum: if it sticks in the groin, it is called a bubonocele groin hernia, if it moves into the scrotum, it makes what is called an oscheocele scrotal hernia. Then, from the omentum, intestine, gas, or water that have slipped into this blind sac, it receives other various names. Nor is the reason different in women, except that there they go near the femoral vessels. (See Schrader's observations, Decade II, Observation IV, V.) Where the true icon of the matter also stands. Indeed, distinguished men later attempted to claim the glory of this most beautiful invention for themselves; but it seems to have had its origin here. But also in the same book, one reads another...