sions of insanity. All the abdominal system even seem to enter into the sad confederacy. The patient complains of a sense of tightness in the region of the stomach, want of appetite, obstinate costiveness, and a sensation of heat in the bowels, which obtains a temporary relief from copious draughts of cooling liquors." p. 17. "In the beginning of this complaint an unusual sensation is felt in the epigastric region, symptomatic, as it would appear, of some great commotion in the centre of the system; which, upon repetition, is felt to extend as far as the abdominal plexus, and to produce a spasmodic oppression of the præcordia, heat of the bowels, and costiveness."-PINEL ON INSANITY, p. 40.

The cause of our disorders, whatever it may be, appears regularly to distribute its effects from the stomach through every nerve and every fibre of the frame; and as this or that part happens to be a little more affected than the rest, and to become the channel by which the constitution throws off something that, if not expelled, would occasion death, the ostensible seat of disease is thus determined, and we accordingly give it a name. This seems to be the whole secret of the distinctive appellations by which we baptize our complaints. On what other ground can it be explained that Morgagni saw pus without the smallest ulceration in the urethra of a patient who had a gonorrhoea at the time of his decease; or that John Hunter, in dissecting a man who died when he had that complaint upon him, should have searched for ulcers and found them no where? Within my own recollection a person died at Oxford in a galloping consumption, without having her lungs at all ulcerated or inflamed; as her physician, to his great surprise, discovered on opening the body. Just as reasonably might it be contended that the smoke which issues from the chimney is independent of the fire below, as that diseases are local and specific.

When diseased matter has accumulated in the body to a certain degree, whether by our own government of ourselves, by the taint we have inherited from our ancestors, or, which is generally the case, from both these causes together, our teeth decay,' rheumatic and other pains and ailments ensue, and complaints are superadded until we are relieved by death, which, in our view of the subject, may be considered premature at eighty or a hundred years of age. From the premises which have been laid down, there follows a conclusion of great importance to our sickly species; viz. that where a certain degree of vigor yet remains in the constitu

The perishing of the teeth is owing to the gums becoming charged with diseased matter, in consent with the general state of the body. The same tooth, which decays rapidly in the mouth, requires ages to destroy it when exposed on the earth to all the inclemencies of the weather.

tion of the invalid (and how many are there who are invalids!) a total abandonment of the artificial exciting diet, or in other words, a strict perseverance in the use of such food as nature has clearly indicated to be proper for us by our anatomy, will enable the vital principle to make such efforts as shall finally succeed in expelling from the body, by indispositions gradually less and less violent, the morbific matter, or principle, which is working its destruction. But if disease shall have already made great and serious ravages within, if the invalid should have permitted too many precious hours to elapse unheeded, there is little hope to be entertained even from the adoption of Dr. Lambe's regimen: none, I fear, from any other quarter. Strong medicines may be resorted to, and momentary effects obtained; but nothing less than a miracle performed in his favor can save him. He is doomed, ere long, to be numbered in the tomb of his fathers.

On whatever side we turn, evidence presses upon us that it is the stomach and its appendages which are the cause and centre both of our well-being and of our infirmities. Through that important organ the race of men may be moulded, and modified, and rendered just what we please to make of them. What a peaceful and respectable existence was that of the ancient Brahmins! Sir William Temple, in his Essay on Learning, says of them, "Their moral philosophy consisted chiefly in preventing all diseases or distempers of the body, from which they esteemed the perturbation of mind in a great measure to arise: then in composing the mind, and exempting it from all anxious cares; esteeming the troublesome and solicitous thoughts about past and future to be like so many dreams, and no more to be regarded. They despised both life and death, pleasure and pain, or at least thought them perfectly indifferent. Their justice was exact and exemplary; their temperance so great, that they lived upon rice or herbs, and upon nothing that had sensitive life. If they fell sick, they counted it such a mark of intemperance, that they would frequently die out of shame and sullenness: but many lived a hundred and fifty, and some two hundred years."

This description of an order of genuine philosophers or moralists is consoling to the mind, and furnishes such a contrast with what we generally see around us, that no one can doubt but that the cause of such a difference must indeed be a powerful one. So impressed am I while I read this passage from the works of Sir William Temple, that were it consistent with the dogmas of our holy religion, I should not hesitate to conclude that this said custom of flesh-eating is either that very principle of evil which we denominate "the devil," or something so parallel with it, that by getting rid of this awkward habit, we should in great measure

banish his satanic majesty from the face of the earth; and indeed from the whole universe; since here alone, among the variety of inhabited globes, has the devil, all this time, been carrying on his hateful operations. This truth we learn from the first and second chapters of the book of Job. Whenever this horned personage makes his appearance in the presence of the Almighty, and the Lord says to him, "Whence comest thou?" his constant and simple answer is, "From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it."

I will now say a few words of the state of the invalid, who would, I believe, eagerly relinquish his erroneous diet, if he could look into his frame and observe the ravages which disease is making there. Rather than contemplate their real source, rather than think of foregoing his accustomed indulgences, the unhealthy man is for ever attributing his sufferings to slight and inadequate causes. He cases himself in fleecy hosiery; he lists his double doors at top and bottom; he lays cushions on his window sashes, and at length injures himself by excluding too carefully the external air from his apartment. His selfishness is ever increasing upon him; his temper does not improve; and there is no limit to his whims and caprices. An Englishman once told me at Rome that he had been brought into that delightful climate1 by an impending consumption, of which the symptoms were unequivocal; and that the cause of his illness had been very clearly and ingeniously explained to him by his physician in London to be his habit of wearing cotton shirts, the minute particles of which made their way into the pores of his skin and entirely obstructed his perspiration. I will take occasion here to mention that the companion of that gentleman and myself, in our rides through the environs of Rome in the year 1794, was Dr. Adam Ferguson, the historian of the Roman republic, who, at that time in his old age, was living strictly on a vegetable regimen. He returned to Scotland from Italy, after having accomplished what he told me had long been uppermost in his thoughts and wishes, this visit to the capitol; and is still alive, being Professor of Mathematics in the University of Edinburgh. The reason why the vegetable diet is not successful in all instances, and therefore not more generally adopted, seems to be that its

It will not be denied that in Italy, where fruits and vegetables rot unused in the streets, a family with two or three acres of garden around them could scarcely have any real occasion for the use of fire or water; and yet, so far from natural were the habits of the Romans, that every one knows the legal sentence of exile was by them denominated Aqua et ignis interdictio, under a persuasion that fire and water were so indispensable to existence, that those persons whom the operation of the law deprived of their use, must necessarily abandon their country, or perish.

beneficial effects have been in great measure counteracted by the impurity of water. It fell to the fortune of Dr. Lambe to discover, by the force of his own reflections, this important fact. Fruits and vegetables, even with the use of common water, would probably prolong life more than animal food; yet, as acute and chronic diseases would still supervene, the benefits derived from the antiphlogistic regimen could neither be sufficient, nor sufficiently manifest, to produce a conviction of its salutury tendency.

Let us again consider a little what is the general state of mankind in respect of intellect. Locke, who thought deeply on the understanding, regards a large portion of mankind as on the brink of insanity; and what he has said is so remarkable, and I believe so just, that I shall beg leave to extract his opinion at some length in the appendix to this volume. I have often met with people, and I dare say the reader has, who were incapable of pointing out the way with any distinctness, to a distant part of this town, though they had often traversed the road; and others whose memory is in so unsettled a state, that when they ring a bell, they require time to recollect their intended order when the servant makes his appearance. Even where these extremes do not exist, there is frequently something so strange and anomalous in the minds of men, that one is wholly at a loss to account for what one sees. The other day I inclined my ear with increased attention towards a person who observed of another that had left the room, "he is a weak man, but a person of considerable ability." I was reduced to ask an explanation, when I found the import of the phrase to be, that our departed companion was a man of talents, of considerable facility in the acquisition of languages and other accomplishments, but of very little common sense or judgment. Though we are not prepared to say, perhaps, with Cabanis, the French physician, that all genius is disease; yet the condition of mind above described is assuredly of that character; and there are many circumstances and indications which lead to a suspicion that extraordinary abilities of every sort are, in the present state of mankind, the result of the principle of vitality struggling against the progress of diseased action. One of our faculties, indeed, the imagination, seems not to have been impaired by our irregularities; although even that power, after a certain point of civilisation and luxurious living, loses in substance what it gains in extension.

The subject which we are upon is abstruse and difficult. I acknowledge myself unworthy to treat it: and after all that abler heads could say, the entire effects of a long-continued unnatural diet on the human mind must be committed to future developement and investigation. That there will be some difficulties for the naturalist to encounter, the following fact may attest:-In those

who are proceeding towards an apoplectic death, the vestiges of the disease may be traced by a careful observer ten or twelve years antecedent to the catastrophe. The increasing stimulus on the brain renders such patients more quick and shrewd than otherwise they would appear; which cleverness, however, must not be confounded nor put into comparison with that more solid judgment and improved memory which would, in all probability, attend on a steady compliance with the dictates of nature. What is known of

the imperfect but more vigorous health of savages may lead to a supposition, that in a really sound and uncorrupted state, the operations of our sight at least and hearing would be much more intense, and our sensual enjoyments more lively than they are at present: that likewise, there would be more spirit in our countenances, more emphasis in our tones, more energy in our actions.

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Contrast this our condition with that of men and women in all the health which, though it has not perhaps been witnessed, may still be imagined. The male broad-shouldered, dignified, erect; his muscles every where strongly pronounced; his sinewy form gradually lessening from the shoulders to the feet; in every limb, vigor and elasticity. The woman more than beautiful; her eyes sparkling with mirth, or brimming with sweetness; happy in her own existence, and increasing the happiness of all around her. Not Venus, first dripping from the ocean, could have been purer or more lovely than such a female.

Before I conclude, I will beg leave to recapitulate what has been said, or implied, in this treatise.

It appears, then, that diseased actions become suspended by the adoption of the regimen discovered by Dr. Lambe: that although paroxysms of disease may be renewed from internal changes which are constantly taking place in the body, they decline in severity, and gradually wear out; but that from the trials hitherto made, two years at least are necessary to produce a radical effect on the constitution; though great relief is sometimes obtained immediately, and sometimes after the expiration of a few months. That if in certain persons a considerable paleness and shrinking of the features are occasioned by this mode of living, it is not essential to it, as young children who are so brought up have a fine color in the second year, and enjoy perfect health and strength. That where such consequence ensues, it need not excite apprehension, since the reason of it is, that by persevering in this temperate diet the determination of blood to the head is prevented. That moreever, to give hopes of great success from this treatment, the patients should not be very old, nor the radical strength much impaired; for in confirmed consumption, frequently in the ulcerated cancer, and in general, wherever the constitution is exhausted, the benefit, as