Vesical Calculus in India: Its Distribution and a Theory of Its Cause *Read at the Indian Medical Congress, December 1894.

rough-and-ready order of pathologists to assert the origin of vesical calculus in " salts in the drinking-water." The theory commends itself by its beautiful simplicity: the patient takes in " stone " at one end and passes it (or fails to do so) at the other, and makes as little demand upon the thoughtful intelligence of those who accept it as it received in the process of its conception. In the course of some observations on the chemistry of the excretions of natives of India, I was struck by the fact, which runs counter to the routine doctrine of the schools, that the excretion of uric acid was far more marked in well-fed natives who never touch meat (or rarely) than in the ordinary European official living in this country. It then occurred to me that some one had attributed " stone "