In wine it abounds, and perhaps no vegetable substance is more replete with it than the juice of the grape.  If we join the grateful taste of wine, we must rank it the first in the list of antiscorbutic liquors.  Cyder is likewise good, with other vinous productions from fruit, as also the various kinds of beer.  It hath been a constant observation, that in long cruizes or distant voyages, the scurvy is never seen whilst the small-beer holds out, at a full allowance; but that when it is all expended, that ailment soon appears.  It were therefore to be wished, that this most wholesome beverage could be renewed at sea; but our ships afford not sufficient convenience.  The Russians however make a shift to prepare on board, as well as at land, a liquor of a middle quality between wort and small-beer, in the following manner.  They take ground-malt and rye-meal in a certain proportion, which they knead into small loaves, and bake in the oven.  These they occasionally infuse in a proper quantity of warm water, which begins so soon to ferment, that in the space of twenty-four hours their brewage is completed, in the production of a small, brisk, and acidulous liquor, they call quas, palatable to themselves, and not disagreeable to the taste of strangers.  The late Dr. Mounsey, fellow of this Society, who had lived long in Russia, and had been Archiater under two successive sovereigns, acquainted me, that the quas was the common and wholesome drink both of the fleets and armies of that empire, and that it was particularly good against the scurvy.  He added, that happening to be at Moscow when he perused my Observations on the Jail and Hospital Fever, then lately published*, he had been induced to compare what he read in that treatise with what he should see in the several prisons of that large city:  but to his surprize, after visiting them all, and finding them full of malefactors (for the late Empress then suffered none of those who were convicted of capital crimes to be put to death) yet he could discover no fever among them, nor learn that any acute distemper peculiar to jails had ever been known there.  He observed, that some of those places of confinement had a yard, into which the prisoners were allowed to come for the air; but that there were others without that advantage, yet not sickly:  so that he could assign no other reason for the healthful condition of those men than the kind of diet they used, which was the same with that of the common people of the country; who not being able to purchase fresh-meat, live mostly on rye-bread (the most acescent of any) and drink quas.  He concluded with saying, that upon his return to St. Petersburg he had made the same inquiry there, and with the same result.

[* That treatise was first published by itself, and afterwards incorporated with the Observations on the Diseases of the Army.]