In the farce of “Master Pathelin” (A.D. 1480), the hero, “in his ravings abuses the doctors ... for not understanding his urine.... Charlatans especially exploited in this field of medicine, practising it illegally in the country under the name of ‘water-jugglers’ and ‘water-judges.’ Such men still practise in Normandy and in certain northern provinces of France.”—(“Med. in the Middle Ages,” Minor, p. 82.) “It is a common practice in these days, by a colourable deriuation of supposed cunning from the vrine, to foretell casualties, and the ordinary euents of life, conceptions of a woman with child, and definite distinctions of the male and female in the womb.” (Cotta, “Short Discovery,” London, 1612, p. 104. He goes on to say that even as a mode of strict medical diagnosis, urinoscopy is not a certain test, the body, in every disease, being more or less disordered, and this disorder acting upon the urine.) Montaigne tells the story of a gentleman who always kept for seven or eight days his excrements, in different basins, in order to talk about and show them. (Buckle, “Commonplace Book,” vol. ii. p. 357, quoting from Montaigne’s “Essais,” lib. iii. cap. 9, p. 600.) Speaking of melancholy people, Burton says, “Their urine is most part pale and low-colored, ‘urina pauca, acris, biliosa’ (Arctæus), and not much in quantity.... Their melancholy excrements, in some very much, in others little.”—(“Anatomy of Melancholy,” vol. i. p. 268.) ON THE INFLUENCE OF THE EMOTIONS UPON THE EGESTÆ. Reciprocally, the influence exerted by the emotions over functional disturbances has been made the subject of investigation by learned commentators. “Aristote, dans les Problèmes Physiques, s’occupe des rapports qui lient les impressions de l’âme aux fonctions intestinales. Il recherche pourquoi une frayeur subite et violente cause presque toujours et incontinent la diarrhée.” (Aule-Gelée, lib. xix. c. 4, “Bib. Scatalog.” p. 66.) Schurig gives numbers of instances of the power of the mind over the act of alvine dejection; evacuation may be caused by perturbation of mind, by fear, by insomnia, by thunder, by anger, etc. See “Chylologia,” p. 701. In a preceding chapter Schurig narrates several examples of people, principally women, who were never able to excite nature to the act of evacuation except by artificial aids addressed to some faculty of the mind,—imagination, laughing, etc. Harington, in “Ajax,” mentions the case of the Pope’s Legate, “who brought the last jubilee into France; who, fearing the pages who by custom bustle about him to divide his canopie, and suspecting treason among them, suddenly laid you wot of in his breeches” (p. 16). Dr. Fletcher, United States Army, has devoted considerable attention to this subject. He has kindly placed the results of his wide range of reading at the disposal of the author of this volume.