It was supposed by the early chemical physicians that antimony imparted emetic properties to wine without any loss of weight. Angelo Sala tells of a German who attained some fame in his time by letting out a piece of glass of antimony on hire. The patient was instructed to immerse this in a cup of wine for three, four, or five hours (according to the strength of the person prescribed for), and then to drink the wine. The practitioner charged a fee of a dozen fresh eggs for the use of his stone, and, as he had hundreds of clients, patients had to wait their turn for their emetic. BISMUTH. Bismuth, the metal, was not known to the ancients nor to the Arabs. It was first mentioned under that name by Agricola, in 1546, in “De Natura Fossilium,” and was not then regarded as a distinct body. Agricola considered it to be a form of lead, and other mining chemists believed that it gradually changed into silver. The Magistery (trisnitrate or oxynitrate) was the secret blanc de fard which Lemery sold in large quantities as a cosmetic. He bought the secret from an unknown chemist and made a large fortune out of it. His process was to dissolve one ounce of the metal in two ounces of nitric acid and to pour on the solution five or six pints of water in which one ounce of sea-salt had been dissolved. The sea-salt would yield a proportion of bismuth oxychloride in the precipitate. Lemery made a pomatum, ʒi to the ounce, and a lotion, ʒi to ʒiv of lily water. Until the latter part of the eighteenth century bismuth salts were regarded as poisonous and were scarcely used in medicine by way of internal administration. Even Odier, of Geneva, to whom we owe the introduction of this medicine in dyspepsia and diarrhœa, prescribed it in 1 grain doses with 10 grains each of magnesia and sugar. Lemery says the bismuth of his time was a compound made in England from the gross and impure tin found in the English mines. “The workmen mix this tin with equal parts of tartar and saltpetre. This mixture they throw by degrees into crucibles made red hot in a large fire. When this is melted they pour it into greased iron mortars and let it cool. Afterwards they separate the regulus at the bottom from the scoriæ and wash it well. This is the tin-glass, which may be called the regulus of tin.” Pomet says much the same about the composition. He adds, “It is so true that tin-glass is artificial that I have made it myself, and am ready to show it to those who won’t believe me.” Those writers belonged to the first quarter of the eighteenth century. A quarter of a century later Quincy is telling us that the metal called Bismuth “is composed of tin, tartar, and arsenic, made in the northern parts of Germany, and from thence brought to England.” Meanwhile Stahl and Dufay had been studying bismuth and had established its character and elementary nature.