186 MINERAL WATERS AND MEDICINAL SPRINGS OF ESSEX.
The foregoing were all treatises on particular springs. Of
English works of a more general nature, one of the earliest
appears to have been that by Dr. Tobias Whitaker, of Norwich
entitled A Discourse of Waters (1634)—a diminutive and not very
valuable volume.
The earliest thorough and systematic treatise on English
medicinal waters appears to have been that by the celebrated
Dr. Martin Lister, F.R.S., published in 1684.1 This was fol-
lowed, a few months later, by another important work on the
same subject by a still more eminent man—the Hon. Robert
Boyle, F.R.S.2 Both these were general works, dealing with
the subject of mineral springs as a whole, rather than with par-
ticular springs ; but, owing to the backward state of chemical
knowledge at the time when they were published, neither has
now any scientific value whatever. Nor does either make any
special reference to our Essex springs.
These two works were followed, after an interval of about
fifteen years, by a work of more special interest, because it dealt,
not with Mineral Waters as a whole, but with the waters of a
number of particular springs. This work,3 published in 1699,
was by Dr. Benjamin Allen ; and, as its author was an Essex
man, residing at Braintree, he gave, not unnaturally, special
attention to the Mineral Springs of the county, eight of which
he describes, as will be noticed hereafter.
Our English Mineral Springs had come, therefore,
prominently into notice during the Seventeenth Century. Yet
they seem (whatever may have been the case in other countries)
to have been more highly valued and more largely resorted to
during the Eighteenth Century and early part of the Nineteenth
than at any other period. This was an age when heavy drink-
ing was fashionable, and the test of gentility was the ability to
consume so many bottles of port at a sitting. In these
"three-bottle" days, Society felt, no doubt, the need of "cor-
rective medicine, and the purging action of the water of
mineral springs was found, without doubt, highly beneficial.
Accordingly, whenever a spring possessing these medicinal
properties was discovered, steps were taken to develop it ; a
1 De FontibusMedicatis Angliae, Exercitatio Nova et Prior, . . . London, Frankfort, and
Leipzig, 1684.
2 Short Memoirs for the Natural Experimental History of Mineral Waters, London, 1684-5.
3 See post, p. 190