THE LIFE OF THE AUTHOR.

...This collected fluid he sent to the most renowned Mr. Carel Drelincourt, Professor of Anatomy and Medicine at the Holland Academy in Leiden. All of this can be seen in the second part of the Amsterdam College, printed by C. Commelin, 1673. For this whole booklet is mostly owed to Mr. Swammerdam. It is there that he gently and modestly refutes the opinions of Sylvius and of de Graaf concerning this juice. And truly, before this time, he treated everyone who wrote anything against him quite sharply; as has been shown in his disputes with de Graaf, Caspar Bartholin, and others. But the diligent exercise of piety had greatly softened his harsh spirit. He had read some books which Miss Antoinette de Bourignon, very well known at this time, had published: these troubled him very much afterward regarding Christian duty. His spirit fled and hated the things that concern man most at heart, especially the passions of the mind, and among these, particularly that insatiable ambition, whereby one wishes to be the supreme. Therefore, he sought to root this out, being a root of many sins, completely from himself. This young woman was then in Holstein, and had in her retinue an Amsterdam merchant, Jan Tielens, who was an old acquaintance of Mr. Swammerdam. To him, he requested through a letter on the 18th of March, 1673, as a friend, that he might want to procure that favor for him with the aforementioned lady, so that he might get permission to write to her about the concerns that tormented his mind regarding the state of his soul. Once this was granted to him, he wrote about it to the lady on the 29th of April for the first time, and received an answer from her on the 17th of August. From that time on, he had become an entirely different man than he had been before; he hardly concerned himself with any matter, except how he might henceforth obtain peace with God for his soul, and lamented bitterly that he had been a slave to the world until now. After that time, he exchanged many other letters with the same lady about these very matters. Around the same time, if I am not mistaken, he discovered, first among men, a matter of the utmost importance. Namely, he discovered that the so-called ruptures hernias of humans, both in men and women, never spring from a tearing of the peritoneum. But that this membrane, simple, is stretched over the place where the seed vessels, contained in a sheath, deviate from the same toward the scrotum, and go away from the peritoneum. If then this peritoneum, there, pressed by any cause, slips into the loose path through which the cord of the seed vessels descends to the testicles, it makes a blind sac. For the membrane is easily extensible, and the extended part is easily admitted into this path, which is soft enough. By the persistence of the same cause, that sac is pushed further and further, and once it has come to this expansion, it continues to press, through the same path, always lying on the outside, against the seed cord, through the muscles, over the pubic bone into the scrotum. If it remains in the groin, it becomes a groin-hernia; if it falls into the scrotum, it becomes a purse-hernia. Depending on whether the omentum, intestine, water, or air falls into this, this blind expansion gets other names. In women, it is the same; only there the hernias run according to the thigh vessels. (See Schrader's Observations...