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rivers, were not shaped into their different degrees of rotundity by attrition, as is usually supposed, betrays a conjecture that there is some solvent quality in water which produces that effect. "El agua y el tiempo son agentes bastante poderosos para obrar fenóminos mui singulares." "Water and time are agents powerful enough to operate very extraordinary phenomena."

It would be easy for me to give from the works of John Hunter, and from other sources, a variety of passages in support of the ill opinion of common water which Dr. Lambe has endeavoured to establish. But why multiply quotations? Those who can be convinced have been convinced already. I will therefore conclude this part of the subject with a few lines from the fourth book of Grainger's Sugar Cane.

One precept more it much imports to know:

The blacks who drink the Quanza's lucid stream,
Fed by ten thousand springs, are prone to bloat;
Whether at home or in the ocean isles.

And tho' nice art the water may subdue,
Yet many die, and few, for many a year,

Such strength attain to labor for their lord.

Of all the children whom I have known or heard of, none has disliked fruit,' but several have refused to eat meat. Some have been made sick with it. But it would rather be expected that distension and uneasiness would be the consequences of excess, and not sickness, of the stomach, where the food is of a quality entirely suited to the animal economy. This indication of what is or is not adapted to the human system ought to have great weight; but I have still stronger ground to rest upon. It will not be denied that the race of men is of all races the most diseased; to such a degree, that the continuance of our lives, even in the usual instances of what is denominated longevity, by no means exceeds the period of maturity so much as among animals in general. Some individuals beyond a doubt have reached a great age. Not to mention Jenkins, Old Thomas Parr of Shropshire completed one hundred and fifty odd years, but cannot of course be supposed to have been sounder and healthier than the wild animals in their native woods. It therefore appears to follow that if men were universally as healthy as these wild animals, they would as certainly exceed the age of one hundred and fifty years. As man reaches his full form and strength in his twenty-fifth year or there

At schools where the point of honor is well sustained, the boys are not considered among themselves as disgraced by robbing an orchard. Think me not jocular, reader, when I inquire whether it may not be owing to fruit being the natural food of man, that this theft is looked upon in a very different light from that of pillaging a fishmonger's or a butcher's stall.

2 Old Parr, sound and healthy as the wild animals, attained one hundred and fifty years.

abouts, it might be expected from the analogies of natural history that he would exist seven or eight times that period. This quickening of the step of death upon us, though it robs us of much of our own existence, is not unfavorable to that of the creation in general; for had it not been the heavenly dispensation that man, by living on animal food, should become unhealthy and rapidly perish,' in the long progression of centuries he would have cleared the earth of all other animals; after which exhibition of his prowess, he might have had a more unanswerable plea than he at present has for making war on his own species. This insinuation must not be regarded as thrown out in the spirit of asperity; for here I would observe once for all that this essay is no vehicle of malignity and sarcasm. It would indeed be an ineffectual method of lowering our species, to trace their good qualities, as I am heartily disposed to do, to the nobleness of their nature, and their errors to the corruptions of society. Men are more to be commiserated than blamed for being driven by impulses, arising out of causes not sufficiently investigated, into the baseness of avarice, or the trammels of ambition. Many a headlong passion has been excited by the food and drink which have stimulated the brain through the stomach; and many an example of fatal despair has been exhibited to the world, from no other cause than that the channels of the secretions were clogged by the daily deglutition of substances ill adapted to the human constitution. Should a chemical analysis of the fluids ever be found within the reach of scientific ingenuity, to which Dr. Lambe's theory of constitutional diseases appears to point, it will then, and not till then, be explained how man, in quitting the nutriment on which alone nature had destined him to enjoy a state of perfect health, has debased his physical, and consequently his moral and intellectual faculties, to a degree almost inconceivable. Real men have never been seen that we are aware of, nor has history, nor even poetry, depictured them. It is not man we have before us, but the wreck of man.

The discoverer of the regimen of distilled water and vegetable diet has had a host of prejudices and self-interests to contend with. "Whatever is wholly new," says the author of the Essay on Sepulchres, "is sure to be pronounced by the mass of mankind to be impracticable; the discovery of gunpowder, the discovery of

All men might be as healthy as the wild animals.

Therefore, all men might attain the age of one hundred and fifty years. 'I say rapidly, as applied to all mankind, in which assertion I am supported by the calculation of the number of births requisite to produce one man or woman of fifty years of age. It is hardly to be credited.

2 Worms are eaten in some places, rats in others, and dogs in the islands of the Pacific Ocean.

printing, the discovery of America, or any other novelty of however great or however minute a scale it may be." It would indeed occupy many pages to enumerate all the useful truths which are contemned, and all the absurdities which are cherished, even in this nineteenth century. But to give an instance or two, and leave them for a thousand. A writer on population of some celebrity, has contended that the destructive operations of whatever sort by which men are killed off or got rid of, are so many blessings and benefits, and he has the triumph of seeing his doctrines pretty widely disseminated and embraced; although no point can be more clearly demonstrable than that the earth might contain and support at least ten times the number of inhabitants that are now upon it. Again: A considerable portion of mankind are at this hour fully persuaded that in marching straight forwards to the mouth of an exploding cannon, they do not in the smallest degree accelerate the instant of their death; nor is this an idle speculation of theirs, for they are ready enough to proclaim their fidelity to the true prophet by their actions. Once more: The conviction which so many persons now have of the globularity of our planet, or of its being three hundred thousand times less than the sun, or of his distance from the earth, must not preclude the further conviction that few people ever have any thing approaching to a just or familiar idea of such distances and dimensions. Indeed, more than one person, not deficient in acquirements, has been wholly incapable of enlarging his thoughts to a belief in the existence of the antipodes, and has published his opinion of the improbability of that fact. There is undoubtedly, from whatever cause, a woful prostration of the human intellect: not one man in five could be

"Harvey is entitled to the glory of having made, by reasoning alone, without any mixture of accident, a capital discovery in one of the most important branches of science. He had also the happiness of establishing at once his theory on the most solid and convincing proofs; and posterity has added little to the arguments suggested by his industry and ingenuity. His treatise of the circulation of the blood is farther embellished by that warmth and spirit which so naturally accompany the genius of invention. This great man was much favored by Charles the First, who gave him the liberty of using all the deer in the royal forests for perfecting his discoveries on the generation of animals. It was remarked that no physician in Europe who had reached forty years of age ever, to the end of his life, adopted Harvey's doctrine of the circulation of the blood; and that his practice in London diminished extremely, from the reproach drawn upon him by that great and signal discovery. So slow is the progress of truth in every science, even when not opposed by factious or superstitious prejudices."

HUME'S HISTORY, vol. vii. p. 347.

2 This subject is at present only glanced at, because it is proposed to resume it in the second part of this publication. The two subsequent parts, the one on Poverty, the other on War, the author will endeavour to compress within the limits of a corresponding pamphlet.

But a

made to comprehend the first six propositions of Euclid. time, I trust, will come when these things will be ordered otherwise; justice having previously been rendered to Dr. William Lambe for his unconquerable energy and perseverance in prosecuting his inquiries by all the slender means in his power. Of those efforts I will not say all that I think, because I would avoid having such praise attributed to the partiality of friendship. I will therefore only add one line concerning him, which is, that I sincerely believe a more philosophic spirit than his all Europe does not contain.

It will be proper, before I proceed any farther in this essay, to apprize the chronic invalid who is disposed to adopt our Hygeian experiment, that he will fall into a great error if he expect all at once, or even very speedily, to be relieved from his malady. Assuming it as a principle of our argument that the ground on which these rules of diet are recommended is just and substantial, and that a general deterioration of the humours has been transmitted, by slow degrees and in a long descent, from father to son, the chronic patient must necessarily suffer attacks from time to time during two or three years, until the mischief in his frame, the matter of death, if I may be permitted so to call it, has been sensibly diminished, or wholly elaborated from his system. Should it be asked how a man, under this gradual amelioration of health, would ever arrive at his end, I answer, he would die of what nature appears to indicate that all animals should die of,-old age; of old age in its strictest sense; that is, of a gradual and imperceptible weakening of the bodily faculties in consent: in a word, of something distinct from disease. The consolation to the selfdenying invalid is this, that after a steady perseverance in the plan we are speaking of for two or three years, he will no longer have to struggle with serious illnesses, it being understood that the stamina of the party are not so worn down that the work of death may be said to be already matured. This not being his unhappy fate, the external symptoms of his progressive amendment will be manifest to all around him; but besides this, the chronic sufferer will be conscious, through his own sensations, that certain internal changes are going on and operating in his favor, till at length the determination of blood to the head shall be diminished, the secretions duly regulated, and the strength and health completely reestablished.

I will now proceed to show, as far as my means, so inadequate to treat this subject, will enable me to do so, that this discovery of Dr. Lambe's is not a mere phantom, that it is not grounded on

VOL. XIX.

1 See Appendix.
Pam.
NO. XXXVIII.

2 L

general remarks or dubious analogies; but that it rests on the only firm basis of philosophical conclusions, on Experiment. The number of persons whom I know to be at this time living on the diet is at least twenty-five; and of these I have to state, that their health is so good that they have no occasion for the use of medicine, and that, without an exception, their indispositions, where they happen at all, are so trifling as scarcely to deserve the name; although they have not yet relinquished meat, fish, and common water, long enough to derive all the advantages which may be thence expected. These persons are of various ages and constitutions; some of them previously in good health, some otherwise; yet with them all the result has been uniform, that is (for I wish to be perfectly moderate and entirely borne out in my assertions) No ill effects have in any instance been felt from the adoption of this regimen. As to what immediately concerns those of the abovementioned number who are under my own roof, I hope such particulars as I shall briefly state will not be uninteresting to the public, who, had I been capable of doing justice to the subject I have in hand, would ere now have been as zealous as the writer himself.

I came two years ago into the house which I now occupy, and in the winter; not without a warning from some of my friends as to the danger of beginning to inhabit it at that season, as it had never before been tenanted. During the first year of my residence here, viz. 1809, the only charge for medicine in my apothecary's bill for seven persons, including the nurse' of my children who, from her own conviction, adopted the diet, was sixpence ; and for the year 1810, not a penny, the apothecary's bill being, word for word, as follows:

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This person's complaint was a species of acute asthma. The affection of the trachea resembled a little the croup, and it was always attended with a hollow cough of an alarming tone. She has entirely got rid of her disorder.

TO BE CONTINUED.

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