BEECH NUTS. (From _Medical Museum_--_London, 1781_--_vol. ii., pp. 97, 294._) From a dissertation on hydrophobia, by Christian Frederick Seleg, M. D., of Enbenstoff, in Saxony, printed in Eslong, in 1762. A boy aged 13 had eaten four days ago a large quantity of beech nuts. I found him in great pain, languid, and terrified with apprehensions of present death. Pulse very unequal, sometimes extremely quick, sometimes languid and intermittent; skin burning violently; mouth flowing with froth and saliva, intolerable thirst, entreating for drink, but as soon as any liquid was brought he seemed to shudder with equal horror, as if he had been eating unripe grapes. Soon after eating the nuts he had been seized with torpor, gloominess and dread of liquids. He had not been bitten by any rabid animal. Next (5th) day, early in the morning, he was the same, but seemed to talk more in his wildness and perturbation of mind, and his mouth flowed with foam more abundantly; the urine he had voided by night was red and firey, depositing a copious turbid white sediment, resembling an emulsion of beech nuts, subsiding as deep as the breadth of the finger at the bottom of the vessel. A few hours before he died he vomited a porraceous bile, after which he died quietly. The author in the _original_ work gives a number of fatal cases of _spontaneous_ hydrophobia. This work should be examined. John Bauhin (_Hist. Plants_, vol. i, pp. 2, 121) says that the nuts will disorder the head like darnel; hogs grow stupid and drowsy by feeding on them. Ray (_Hist. of Plants_, tom. ii, p. 1382) and Mangetus (_Biblioth. Pharm._, vol. i, p. 910) says the same. FRAXINUS EXCELSIOR. NAT. ORD., Oleaceæ. COMMON NAME, European Ash. PREPARATION.--The fresh leaves are pounded to a pulp and macerated with two parts by weight of alcohol. (In the _Union Médicale_, November, 1852, two French physicians detailed several cases of gout and rheumatism treated with _Fraxinus excelsior_, or ash leaves, one of Rademacher's favorite remedies. Of the two physicians, one of them, Dr. Peyraud, was himself relieved of the gout by this treatment.) Ash-leaves were highly recommended by Rademacher, and have been quite extensively used in Germany on his suggestion. In the _Union Médicale_ for Nov. 27, 1852, two French physicians, Drs. Pouget and Peyraud, detailed several cases of gout and rheumatism cured by an infusion of ash-leaves in boiling water. Dr. Peyraud himself was one of those relieved.