Additional letters of a physician on the quality of the St Mary's Loch water / by Charles Wilson.

  • Wilson, Charles, 1804-1883.
Date:
1871
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Additional letters of a physician on the quality of the St Mary's Loch water / by Charles Wilson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

    14/26 (page 12)
    In his evidence before the Parliamentary Committee, Dr Mac- lagan declared upon oath that, when he had looked at the -quotations from French authors in the letters of “ A Physician,” he had found sentences of them mistranslated. Against this I instantly reclaimed in your paper of the 2d of May. In Dr Maclagan’s replies of the 3d and 4th of May, embodied since in his communication in your paper of May 11, he does not himself specify the original sentences, which he ought to have ascertained before condemning the transla- tion of them, but requires me to point out the passage or passages whence I extract “the very extraordinary statement ascribed to Tardieu,” that “ most writers hold the presence of one part of car- bonate of lime in two thousand of water as advantageous; ” with the passage or passages from which I make out that Hugueny “sets the chief value on the existence of lime in waters from its being re- quired in the period of man’s growth.” And these, amounting together to barely three lines, constitute the whole of the charges, at that time still unattempted to be proved, that are brought against a pamphlet of upwards of two thousand lines, teeming everywhere with references. That Dr Maclagan was still himself in the dark as to the precise passage in Tardieu, the rendering of which he had thus recklessly denounced, is shown in his letter of May 9, when he states that carbonate of lime is not specified in it, though I had given that designation. Nevertheless, he defies me, in the same letter, by any literary alchemy, to extract anywhere the views which I had con- nected with Tardieu’s name. He admits, however, that if I can produce a sentence from Tardieu that shows him to say that “most writers hold the presence of one part of lime in 2000 to be advan- tageous,” I am entitled to an acquittal; but then certain unhappy consequences are to follow to Tardieu, which I by no means think at all necessary to follow, and with which, at all events, I have not the remotest concern. Knowing well on what grounds I stood myself, I saw all this time my would-be assailant wriggling in the toils, without lending him the aid he so repeatedly asked to extricate him, simply because I thought it but just that he should himself speak his own convic- tion. Yet my aid was, after all, required, and was vouchsafed at last in my letter in your columns of May 12, wdien I gave him that information which he ought not to have needed, by indicating the precise paragraph and passage on which my statement was founded, in order that I might put an end to the delay caused by such continuous evasions, and have the result announced before that decision of the Parliamentary Committee which I did not then expect to prove so calamitous for the city. In the immediately pre- ceding paragraph of Tardieu, referred to by Dr Maclagan, the writer himself proved that he did not consider that he had hitherto said anything to settle a merely general question, which he had pre- viously propounded, by proceeding now to state that, in order to its solution, it was still necessary to appreciate the influence of a variety