An Account of the Nature and Medicinal Virtues of the Principal Mineral Waters of Great Britain and Ireland: And Those Most in Repute on the Continent

Although he was tried for attempted murder and died in Newgate Prison, the natural philosopher and apothecary John Elliot (1747-87) published a number of significant scientific works in the first part of the 1780s, especially with regard to sensory perception. This 1789 second edition of a 1781 work is essentially an alphabetically arranged catalogue of the principal British mineral waters, their properties and uses, along with those ‘most celebrated ones which the English valetudinarian may have occasion to visit on the continent’. In his introduction, Elliot classes the waters according to their respective mineral properties and supplies details of the four classes of substances found united with water, and three methods for analysis. An extract of Joseph Priestley’s 1772 pamphlet Directions for Impregnating Water with Fixed Air, with Dr John Nooth’s alternative method as an appendix, forms an entertaining preface, informative as to the history of producing carbonated water.