PROUT, William, a distinguished physician, was born in 1786, and took the degree of M.D. at Edinburgh. Settling in London, he began to apply chemistry to his professional studies. The results of his investigations were published in Thomson's Annals of Philosophy, the Philosophical Transactions, the Philosophical Magazine, and other scientific journals. They also appeared in separate treatises. An Enquiry into the Nature and Treatment of Gravel, Calculus, and other Diseases connected with a deranged operation of the Urinary Organs, was produced in 1821. Not long afterwards he published all his discoveries in a collected form, in a treatise On the Nature and Treatment of Stomach and Renal Diseases. By these and other labours Prout attained to a position of eminence. He was employed to write a Bridgewater essay on Chemistry, Meteorology, and the Function of Digestion, considered with reference to Natural Theology. So successful was his work on Stomach and Renal Diseases that it reached a fifth edition in 1848. At the time of his death in 1850, he was a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of London and also of the Royal Society.