BOULIMIA CENTENARIA.1 [MS. SLOAN. 1833, and MS. RAWL. LVIII.] THERE is a woman now living in Yarmouth, named Elizabeth Michell, an hundred and two years old; a person of four feet and half high, very lean, very poor, and living in a mean room with pitiful accommodation. She had a son after she was past fifty.2 Though she answers well enough unto ordinary questions, yet she apprehends her eldest daughter to be her mother; but what is most remarkable concerning her is a kind of boulimia or dog-appetite; she greedily eating day and night what her allowance, friends, or charitable persons afford her, drinking beer or water, and making little distinction or refusal of any food, either of broths, flesh, fish, apples, pears, and any coarse food, which she eateth in no small quantity, insomuch that the overseers for the poor have of late been fain to augment her weekly allowance. She sleeps indifferently well, till hunger awakes her; then she must have no ordinary supply whether in the day or night. She vomits not, nor is very laxative. This is the oldest example of the sal esurinum chymicorum, which I have taken notice of; though I am ready to afford my charity unto her, yet I should be loth to spend a piece of ambergris I have upon her, and to allow six grains to every dose till I found some effect in moderating her appetite: though that be esteemed a great specific in her condition. 1 Boulimia.] Brutus was attacked with this disease on his march to Durachium.-Plutarch. 2 She had a son, &c.] A duplicate copy of this paper in the Bodleian (MS. Rawl. lviii.) reads "her youngest son is forty-five years old." UPON THE DARK THICK MIST HAPPENING ON THE 27TH OF NOVEMBER, 1674. [MS. SLOAN. 1833, fol. 136.] THOUGH it be not strange to see frequent mists, clouds, and rains, in England, as many ancient describers of this country have noted, yet I could not [but] take notice of a very great mist which happened upon the 27th of the last November, and from thence have taken this occasion to propose something of mists, clouds, and rains, unto your candid considerations. Herein mists may well deserve the first place, as being, if not the first in nature, yet the first meteor mentioned in Scripture, and soon after the creation, for it is said, Gen. ii. that "God had not yet caused it to rain upon the earth, but a mist went up from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground," for it might take a longer time for the elevation of vapours sufficient to make a congregation of clouds able to afford any store of showers and rain in so early days of the world. Thick vapours, not ascending high but hanging about the earth and covering the surface of it, are commonly called mists; if they ascend high they are termed clouds. They remain upon the earth till they either fall down or are attenuated, rarified, and scattered. The great mist was not only observable about London, but in remote parts of England, and as we hear, in Holland, so that it was of larger extent than mists are commonly apprehended to be; most men conceiving that they reach not much beyond the places where they behold them. Mists make an obscure air, but they beget not darkness, for the atoms and particles thereof admit the light, but if the matter thereof be very thick, close, and condensed, the mist grows considerably obscure and like a cloud, so the miraculous and palpable darkness of Egypt is conceived to have been effected by an extraordinary dense and dark mist or a kind of cloud spread over the land of Egypt, and also miraculously restrained from the neighbour land of Goshen. : Mists and fogs, containing commonly vegetable spirits, when they dissolve and return upon the earth, may fecundate and add some fertility unto it, but they may be more unwholesome in great cities than in country habitations for they consist of vapours not only elevated from simple watery and humid places, but also the exhalations of draughts, common sewers, and foetid places, and decoctions used by unwholesome and sordid manufactures: and also hindering the sea-coal smoke from ascending and passing away, it is conjoined with the mist and drawn in by the breath, all which may produce bad effects, inquinate the blood, and produce catarrhs and coughs. Sereins, well known in hot countries, cause headache, toothache, and swelled faces; but they seem to have their original from subtle, invisible, nitrous, and piercing exhalations, caused by a strong heat of the sun, which falling after sunset produce the effects mentioned. There may be also subterraneous mists, when heat in the bowels of the earth, working upon humid parts, makes an attenuation thereof and consequently nebulous bodies in the cavities of it. There is a kind of a continued mist in the bodies of animals, especially in the cavous parts, as may be observed in bodies opened presently after death, and some think that in sleep there is a kind of mist in the brain; and upon exceeding motion some animals cast out a mist about them. When the cuttle fish, polypus, or loligo, make themselves invisible by obscuring the water about them; they do it not by any vaporous emission, but by a black humour ejected, which makes the water black and dark near them: but upon excessive motion some animals are able to afford a mist about them, when the air is cool and fit to condense it, as horses after a race, so that they become scarce visible. [ACCOUNT OF A THUNDER STORM AT NOR WICH, 1665.] [MS. SLOAN. 1866, fol. 96.] June 28, 1665. AFTER seven o'clock in the evening there was almost a continued thunder until eight, wherein the tonitru and fulgur, the noise and lightning, were so terrible, that they put the whole city into an amazement, and most unto their prayers. The clouds went low, and the cracks seemed near over our heads during the most part of the thunder. About eight o'clock, an ignis fulmineus, pila ignea fulminans, telum igneum fulmineum, or fire-ball, hit against the little wooden pinnacle of the high leucome window of my house, toward the market-place, broke the flue boards, and carried pieces thereof a stone's cast off; whereupon many of the tiles fell into the street, and the windows in adjoining houses were broken. At the same time either a part of that close-bound fire, or another of the same nature, fell into the court-yard, and whereof no notice was taken till we began to examine the house, and then we found a freestone on the outside of the wall of the entry leading to the kitchen, half a foot from the ground, fallen from the wall; a hole as big as a foot-ball bored through the wall, which is about a foot thick, and a chest which stood against it, on the inside, split and carried about a foot from the wall. The wall also, behind the leaden cistern, at five yards distance from it, broken on the inside and outside; the middle seeming entire. The lead on the edges of the cistern turned a little up; and a great washingbowl, that stood by it, to recover the rain, turned upside down, and split quite through. Some chimneys and tiles were struck down in other parts of the city. A fire-ball also struck down the walk in the market-place. And all this, God be thanked! without mischief unto any person. The greatest terror was from the noise, answerable unto two or three cannon. The smell it left was strong, like that after the discharge of a cannon. The balls that flew were not like fire in the flame, but the coal; and the people said it was like the sun. It was discutiens, terebrans, but not urens. It burnt nothing, nor any thing it touched smelt of fire; nor melted any lead of window or cistern, as I found it do in the great storm, about nine years ago, at Melton-hall, four miles off, at that time when the hail broke three thousand pounds worth of glass in Norwich, in half-a-quarter of an hour. About four days after, the like fulminous fire killed a man in Erpingham church, by Aylsham, upon whom it broke, and beat down divers which were within the wind of it. One also went off in Sir John Hobart's gallery, at Blickling. He was so near that his arm and thigh were numbed about an hour after. Two or three days after, a woman and horse were killed near Bungay; her hat so shivered that no piece remained bigger than a groat, whereof I had some pieces sent Granades, crackers, and squibs, do much resemble the discharge, and aurum fulminans the fury thereof. Of other thunderbolts or lapides fulminei, I have little opinion. Some I have by me under that name, but they are è genere fossilium. THOMAS BROWNE. unto me. Norwich, 1665. [ON DREAMS.] [MS. SLOAN. 1874, fol. 112, 120.] HALF our days we pass in the shadow of the earth; and the brother of death exacteth a third part of our lives. A good part of our sleep is peered out with visions and fantastical objects, wherein we are confessedly deceived. The day supplieth us with truths; the night with fictions and falsehoods, which uncomfortably divide the natural account of our beings. And, therefore, having passed the day in sober labours and rational enquiries of truth, we are fain to betake ourselves unto such a state of being, wherein the soberest heads have acted all the monstrosities of melancholy, and which unto open eyes are no better than folly and madness. Happy are they that go to bed with grand music, like Pythagoras, or have ways to compose the fantastical spirit, |