A philosophical and statistical history of the inventions and customes of ancient and modern nations in the manufacture and use of inebriating liquors : with the present practice of distillation in all its varieties: together with an extensive illustration of the consumption and effects of opium, and other stimulants used in the East, as substitutes for wine and spirits / By Samuel Morewood.

  • Morewood, Samuel.
Date:
1838
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A philosophical and statistical history of the inventions and customes of ancient and modern nations in the manufacture and use of inebriating liquors : with the present practice of distillation in all its varieties: together with an extensive illustration of the consumption and effects of opium, and other stimulants used in the East, as substitutes for wine and spirits / By Samuel Morewood. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

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    19 follow this custom, and have a very ingenious method of taking off the skins. The head of the goat, or sheep, is first removed; and while the body is yet warm, the hand is introduced beneath the skin of the neck, and worked round until the two forefeet are drawn out. The skin is then stripped off so as to be without a cut or mark on it, and this forms the leathern bag just described. The bottles mentioned in Scripture were of tins sort, the use of glass being then unknown. So we read, that when Abraham sent Hagar away, he put a bottle of water upon her shoulder, and hence our Saviour's instruction not to put new wine into old bottles, meaning that the fermentation of the wine would, more readily, burst an old than a new bottle of this des- cription.*—It is generally believed, that the skins of animals were the most ancient receptacles of all liquids, but more especially of wine and they were rendered water-tight by a coating of resinous, oily matter: it was the skin of a goat in which Ulysses carried a supply of wine presented to him by the priest of Apollo, when he visited the cavern of the Cyclops. The largest of these wine-bags, of which there is any account, was that exhibited at a feast given by Ptolemy Phila- delphus, and drawn on a car 75 feet long by 42 feet broad: this bag was composed of panthers' skins, and contained 20,250 gallons. The modern Greeks convey their wines to different parts in leathern or skin bags, such as those used by the Spaniards and Portuguese for the same purpose; and they are preferred to every other sort of vessel in consequence of being more portable. It is the practice, in many parts of the East, in making such wine-bottles, to turn the hairy side of the skin inwards. To the Gauls, who settled on the banks of the Po, we are indebted for the useful invention of preserving wine in casks or vessels of wood.f As chemistry may be said to have formed no part of the general knowledge of the ancient Greeks, it would be vain to look for any thing like distillation among them; for, although an ingenious and polished people, they do not appear to have been acquainted with that art. Medicine was much esteemed by them, but their pharmacopeia, until a late period, scarcely ever extended beyond the list of simples used by Hippocrates.^ Then- early intercourse with the Egyptians made them familiar Avith the working of metals, but none of their writers anterior to Pliny, whose works have descended to us, shew that they were acquainted with the raising of steam or vapour to the same extent or in the manner described by that celebrated Roman.S * Matthew ix. and xvii. y Rollin. % For a list of these simples, see Le Clerc's Hist, de la Med. part I. b. iii. cap. 23.