My epistolatory sins multiply upon me at such a rate, I
am almost ashamed to face a correspondent of any description, and quite so to
appear before you. Where are my congratulatory replies to your Dublin letter,
announcing your marriage? Literally in
nubibus. I say literally, for scores
of them passed through my brain in forms so airy, that they flew aloft before I
could catch one to fix upon paper. The sober truth
| 26 | LADY MORGAN'S MEMOIR. |
I have not been in town since the summer of 1811, nor much at Cheltenham, preferring, whenever I am permitted, the enjoyment of my cottage, in this my native village. But don’t think I spend my time in idleness. My pursuit has lately been, when uninterrupted by vaccination, the morbid changes in the structure of the livers of brutes, which has led me to some conclusions respecting the same changes in the human, ’tis hard, methinks, that the poor animal that is content with what the meadows afford for his daily bill of fare, and whose cellar is the pond or the brook, should perish from the same diseases as the drunkard; but so it is. There are plants which, somehow or another, are capable of throwing the state of the liver into that sort of confusion which calls hydatids into existence. These do not continue long in their native state, but produce a great variety of tubera, cartilaginous, bony masses, &c. In other instances, the disease originates in the biliary ducts, which become astonishingly enlarged, and thickened in every part of the liver, and finally destroy it in various ways. This is the outline of my research. The hydatid I can call into existence in the rabbit in about a fortnight.
I most heartily wish well to the scheme you have in view,
and shall use my best endeavours to promote it. I know but little of the
locality of Dublin; but it is
| KILDARE STREET—1813. | 27 |
