a well-known animal fluid, which nature prepares in the breasts of women, and the udders of other animals, for the nourishment of their young. Milk is a liquor prepared from the aliment chewed in the mouth, digested in the stomach, perfected by the force and juices of the intestines, and elaborated by means of the mesentery and its gland and juices, and the juices of the thoracic duct. It has undergone some actions of the veins, arteries, heart, lungs, and juices, and began to be assimilated; yet may still be had separate and discharged out of the body. And thus by their own milk, prepared from the proper matter of the chyle, all the known lactiferous animals are nourished, both male and female. For milk is always prepared from chyle as well in men as in women, in virgins and barren women, in mothers and nurses. Milk approaches nearer to an animal nature than chyle.

If milk be good, and suffered to rest in a clean vessel, it first appears uniformly white; then throws up a white, thick, unctuous cream to its surface, and remains somewhat bluish below. The milks of all the known animals have these properties alike. The human milk is very sweet and thin, the next is that of ass, then that of mares, then of goats, and lastly of cows; whence it is prescribed in this order to consumptive persons of weak visera. The rennet prepared of the juices of such creatures as chew the cud being mixed with milk, coagulates it into an uniform mass, which may be cut with a knife, and it thus spontaneously separates into whey and curds; if long boiled over the fire, it loses its more fluid parts, and condenses into a butyrateous and cheesy mass.

Milk is an efficacious remedy in disorders of the breast. But it is to be observed, that all milks are not of the same kind, and of the same efficacy for all purposes; since, according to the diversity of animals and their respective foods, they are possessed of different and peculiar qualities which are to be considered apart. First, then, asses milk, contains a great deal of sweet serum, but a very small quantity of earthy, caseous, and pinguous substance; for which reason it is not easily coagulated, and, consequently, but very unfit for butter and cheese. Its whey is astringent, laxative, moistening, and proper for correcting the acrimony of the humours. Goats milk does not contain so large a quantity of whey as that of asses, nor is it of so laxative and astringent a nature, but of a thicker consistence; and, as goats eat the leaves of trees which contain something of a resinous quality, their milk is very efficacious for the consolidation of suppurred parts. Cows-milk is more pinguous, contains a large quantity of earth, but less whey, for which reason it generally yields a great deal of butter and cheese. This species of milk is of a temperating, nutritive and consolidating virtue. Women's milk, for medicinal purposes, is preferable to all others; for it is the finest of them all, and its nutritive quality is sufficiently observable in infants. The virtues of milk are also different, according to the diversity of herbs and pasturage which animals eat. Hence milk in the spring is highly salutary, because at that time the vegetables abound with temperate juices; whereas milk in the winter is accounted less salutary, because the animal's feed on hay and straw.

Dr. Cheyne recommends a milk and seed diet, with water for drink, as the surest preservative against diffeases, and cure of them.