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History of Shotley spa, and vicinity of Shotley bridge
History of Shotley spa and vicinity of Shotley bridge Author:John Ryan Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: NATURAL PRODUCTIONS. 75 CHAPTER III. Value Of Natural Productions Sacred Fountains Of The Ancients—"hallywell"—Former Repute And Recent Discovery Of ... more »The Spa The Stratification West's Analysis Of The Water Dr. Granville's Opinion Dr. Clanny's—Cases Of Cure—Discovery Of Another Spa— Dr. Clanny's Analysis—Comparison Of The Spas—The Accommodations—-general Orservations And Directions For Use Of Mineral Waters. " Man is the servant anil interpreter of Nature," said the profound philosopher Bacon, stating an unquestionable proposition which at once exploded the golden theories of the old alchemists, and laid the foundation on which modern chemists have built the solid framework of practical science. The alchemists generally imagined they had the power to transmute all the substances of nature into gold, and to invent a medicinal panacea sufficiently efficacious to make man immortal in this world more certainly than " the fruit of the tree of life." But innumerable inductions of experimental philosophy have demonstrated, that the substances in nature and their combinations, their laws of union and crystallization, are quite as immutable as the data of mathematics; and that the whole 76 NATURAL PRODUCTIONS. power of man over them is, the ability to bring them into contact and leave them, according to invariable laws, to produce the result. Hence, in modern times, the rapid advance of practical science, and the more accurate knowledge of nature ; hence, for instance, the vast improvements in the telescope from a more minute examination of the human eye ; and, hence, also in the Materia Medica many efficacious remedies that are imitations of what nature has spontaneously produced, or are taken from their natural laboratories in the botanical and mineral worlds. N...« less