MINERAL WATERS AND MEDICINAL SPRINGS OF ESSEX. 197
Elsewhere he says14 :—
" This water is of taste lixiviate, with a little bitterness, and not free of the
maukish taste of the rest [of the mineral waters belonging to the same class], but
not so nauseous as Epsam.
" With syrup of violets, it gave a full green, as alkalys [do] ; with which it
agreed in giving a dusky gold colour, near that of Malaga sack, with Lignum
nephriticum14a ; in turning thick and dark with iron and gall, not black or blewish
as vitriols, common salt, and saltpetre. . . . [After detailing the results of
many other equally-unsatisfying tests which he applied to the water, he con-
tinues :—] The salt wherewith this water is impregnated appears to be a full
alkali......joyn'd with a hard coagulating acid, not of the nature of
common salt, but rather of saltpetre's second salt. And, according to
this nature of it, this water will not keep sweet four days; whereas the others
will [keep sweet] near three times that time.
"That this [water] should be injurious in leprous cases is very intelligible,
from its alkalisateuess to raise the blood and ulcerate and its coagulative acidity.
This water of Brentwood I have experienced beneficiall in
hypochondriacal cases, particularly at the beginning. But the difference of the
constitution of the patient is necessary to be consulted. . . . ; for,
whereas the melancholy and dull crasis of one patient's blood made this a
suitable remedy, yet I observed, in another gentlewoman of the same years, but
of a florid sanguine complexion, this water to be of so differing an effect as to
cause violent flushings of the body and face and an obstruction of the catamenia ;
all which, the nature of the salt accounts for"15
Another contemporary reference to this well is that of Sir
John Bramston, K.B., of Skreens, Roxwell, who relates16 that,
being taken ill on the 1st September 1699, when in his eighty-
ninth year, he "tooke some Gascon's pouder and dranck Weald
water." The statement implies that the well had already
become widely famed and that water from it was valued for
certain medicinal purposes.
Yet another early reference to this same well is that of the
Rev. Thomas Cox, who, writing in 1720, says" that there were
in Essex "some springs of a medicinal nature, as those of
Upminster and Burntwood Weal."
A description of the well, written rather more than sixty
years later than the foregoing, is that of Dr. W. Martin Trinder,
who says18:—
" The spring is well sheltered from the weather by an arch of brick. The water
14 Op. cit, pp. 144-147.
14a Mr. Dalton points out that this was a preparation of the wood of Morinia pterygosperma,
an Indian tree.
15 In his work of 1711, Allen gives (pp. 20-21) merely a condensation of the above and no
new information.
16 Autobiography, p. 411 (Camden Soc, 1845).
17 Magna Britannia, i., p. 722 (1720).
18 Medicinal Waters in Essex, p. 29 (1783).