Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 19.djvu/296

 of the ear serve the same purpose, he says, as the wooden rod inside a violin, ‘ad continuandos tremores.’ His ‘Introduction to Physiology,’ 369 pages, 8vo, Lond. 1759, being the substance of his London lectures increased to twenty-eight, is full of the latest information well digested. He employed a person in the Norway trade to get for him a manuscript copy of a paper on the resuscitation of the drowned by a Copenhagen authority. His first work, dated from Hull in June 1738 and published at York in 1740, was ‘Neuropathia,’ a Latin poem in three books on hypochondriasis and hysteria, with a prose summary and additions prefixed, dedicated to Peter Shaw (‘Doctissime Shavi!’); it was republished at Rome, with an Italian translation by Moretti, in 1755. His next venture was ‘A Proposal for the Improvement of Medicine, &c.,’ being a collection of therapeutic essays on the use of bark in small-pox, on limes and other fruits and vegetables in scurvy, &c.; it was dedicated to Mead, who had been pleased with the ‘Neuropathia.’ In 1748 he published a new edition, much enlarged, and with remarks on Berkeley's tar-water doctrine and on the bishop's use of the term ‘panacea.’ In 1751 he published in London ‘The Nature of the Nervous Fluid, or Animal Spirits,’ an attempt to adapt the latter doctrine to current nervous physiology. In the same year he published anonymously ‘A new Critical Examination of an Important Passage in Mr. Locke's Essay on Human Understanding [on the possibility of thought being superadded to matter], in a familiar letter to a friend.’ In 1753 he issued a physiological comment on Solano's prognostics from the pulse (dicrotism, intermittence, &c.), an account of which had been brought to England by Dr. Nihell, physician to the English factory at Madrid. In 1755 Flemyng published a paper in the ‘Philosophical Transactions’ on the imbibition of the liquor amnii by the fœtus. Another paper, on corpulency, was read at the Royal Society in 1757, but not issued until the author printed it in 1760; it was translated into German by J. J. Plenk at Vienna in 1769, and reprinted in London as late as 1810. In 1754 he published at York ‘A Proposal to diminish the Progress of the Distemper among the Horned Cattle’ (2nd edition, Lond. 1755). His other writings are a ‘Dissertation on James's Fever Powder’ (Lond. 1760), and ‘Adhesions or Accretions of the Lungs to the Pleura’ (Lond. 1762), discussing the divergent views of Boerhaave and Haller as to the effects on the breathing. A disparaging criticism of this unimportant piece by a London reviewer caused him to issue the remainder of the impression with a ‘Vindication’ in 1763.

[Epistolæ ad Hallerum, vol. iii.; Flemyng's writings.] 

FLETA, though sometimes loosely used as if it were the name of a person, is really the name of a Latin text-book of English law, which, from internal evidence, seems to have been written in 1290 or thereabouts. It was printed with a dissertation by Selden in 1647, and again in 1685. The one old manuscript in which it is found (Cotton MS. Julius, B. viii., fourteenth century) bears on its frontispiece the title ‘Fleta,’ and in the preface there is a statement to the effect that ‘this book may well be called Fleta, for it was composed in Fleta.’ This seems to mean that it was written in the Fleet prison, and the conjecture has been made that it was the work of one of the corrupt judges whom Edward I imprisoned.

[The manuscript; Selden's Dissertation; Nichols's Introduction to edition of Britton (1865).] 

FLETCHER, ABRAHAM (1714–1793), mathematician, born in 1714 at Little Broughton, Bridekirk, Cumberland, was the son of a tobacco-pipe maker, who taught him his own trade, but gave him no higher instruction. The boy learnt to read, write, and cipher as he best could, applying himself particularly to the study of arithmetic, from which he proceeded to the investigation of mathematical theorems. After the day's toil in the workshop he would hoist himself by a rope into the loft over his father's cottage, in order to pursue his studies uninterruptedly. Having worked through Euclid he set up as a schoolmaster at the age of thirty, and acquired considerable reputation as a teacher of mathematics. He married early. His wife, like his parents, discouraged the pursuit of learning as an unprofitable thing. Turning his attention to botany, Fletcher studied the properties rather than the classification of plants; increased his income by the sale of herbal decoctions, and was known to his neighbours as ‘Doctor Fletcher.’ He also studied judicial astrology, and cast his own nativity, which Hutchinson found in one of his books. ‘This gives,’ says another astrologer, ‘seventy-eight years and fifty-five days’ duration of life. Fletcher lived seventy-eight years seventy-one days, dying on 1 Jan. 1793.

Fletcher published: 1. ‘The Universal Measurer; the Theory of Measuring in all its various uses, whether artificers' works, gauging, surveying, or mining,’ Whitehaven, 1753, 2 vols. 8vo. 2. ‘The Universal Measurer