PRINGLE. 181 HOW maintains, in the confinement of a ship, a degree of health nearly equal to, if not often ex- ceeding, the average observed at home. . Pringle became physician extraordinary to the king in 1774. We have not room for the enume- ration of the honours which he gradually received from abroad, and can only select his admission as one of the foreign members of the Royal Academy of Sciences at Paris, to which he succeeded on the vacancy which Linnaeus had left in a society not prodigal of its favour. He had been elected to the chair of the Royal Society in the sixty-sixth year of his age, and the pressure of advancing time, increased by an injury from a fall, induced him, in 1778, to resign his arduous dignity, al- though earnestly solicited to retain it. The illus- trious Banks was appointed his successor. Pringle's house continued to be the resort of ingenious men of all nations ; his conversations, given on Sunday evenings, formed a point of union between his own friends and scientific travellers. He hoped, at length, to derive advantage to his infirmities from a journey to Scotland, and for a short time fixed his residence at Edinburgh. But Edinburgh, however interesting in other respects, failed in restoring to his spirits the renovating impulse which he had fondly anticipated : it presented the wreck of former ties, and that melancholy spec- tacle of vanished kindred and declining friends, which ever awaits the aged wanderer on revisiting the scenes of his youth. Before entirely quitting this city he presented ten volumes, folio, of Me- dical and Physical Observations, in manuscript, to the College of Physicians. He was, at the
