been dissolved. The sea-salt would yield a proportion of bismuth oxychloride in the precipitate. Lemery made a pomatum, i to the ounce, and a lotion, i to iv 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.
Liquor Bismuthi et Ammonii Citratis was introduced
