Black Bile, or Melancholy.**

According to the ancients it hath a twofold origin:

1st, From the grosser parts of the blood, and this they called the melancholy humour. 2d, From yellow bile being highly concocted. Dr Perceval, in his Essays Med. and Exp. suggests, that it is the gall rendered acrid by a stagnation in the gall-bladder, and rendered viscid by the absorption of its fluid parts. Bile in this state discharged into the duodenum, occasions universal disturbance and disorder until it is evacuated; it occasions violent vomiting, or purging, or both; and previous to this the pulse is quick, the head aches, a delirium comes on, a hiccough, intense thirst, inward heat, and a fetid breath. Some describe this kind of bile as being acid, harsh, corroding, and when poured on the ground, bubbling up and raising the earth after the manner of a ferment. Dr Percival says, that by the use of the infus. senec. limon. warmed with the tinct. colubri, he had checked the vomitings occasioned by this matter.

**ATRA DIES,** in antiquity, denotes a fatal day whereon the Romans received some memorable defeat. The word literally imports a black day; a denomination taken from the colour which is the emblem of death and mourning. Whence the Thracians had a custom of marking all their happy days with white stones or calculi, and their unhappy days with black ones; which they cast, at the close of each day, into an urn. At the person's death the stones were taken out; and from a comparison of the numbers of each complexion, a judgment was made of the felicity or infelicity of his course of life. The dies atra or atri were afterwards denominated nefasti and posteri. Such in particular was the day when the tribunes were defeated by the Gauls at the river Allia, and lost the city; also that whereon the battle of Cannae was fought; and several others marked in the Roman calendar, as atrae or unfortunate.