For a certain period he submits to the ordeal, but his general strength gives way, and in the extremity of despair he becomes the victim of some crafty knave, who undertakes his cure by the aid of the millionth part of a grain of blue pill, or some equally dishonest empiric, who, in one day, administers more pills than would suffice, according to Homoeopathic views, for every inhabitant of the solar system. I appeal to the candid and enlightened members of the profession to say whether I have caricatured the portrait. No one can believe that I intend to cast the slightest reproach upon any legitimate practitioner by these observations; it is to the unsettled state of professional opinion upon the subject of diet, and to the obscurity which involves the theory of digestion, that all these evils are to be attributed. But to return to the subject of dietetic works; it appears to me that their authors have laid far too great stress upon the quality of the different species of food, and have condemned particular aliments for those effects which should be attributed to the quantity, and still more perhaps to the circumstances1 under which they were taken; their dietetic precepts have frequently assumed the air of ascetic austerities, and they have thus represented the cure far more formidable than the disease.

It has been sarcastically observed, that there exists a more intimate connexion between the doctrine of Tertullian and that of many a dietetic practitioner, than is generally supposed - that he is the ascetic intrenched in gallipots and blisters, preaching against beef and porter; terrifying his audience with fire and brimstone in one age, and in the other with gout and apoplexy. Now, while we must all deeply lament that the severity of this sarcasm should have been, in some measure, sanctioned by the theoretical absurdities of many of our minor writers, it is impossible that any reasonable person can seriously contend, that numerous diseases do not arise from an improper management of diet; much less, that a judicious regulation of it cannot be rendered subservient to their cure.

1 "It was the great number of physicians that killed the Emperor".

1 I allude particularly to a class of phenomena termed "Non-naturals," upon which the ancients laid considerable stress, but which the moderns appear to have too hastily disclaimed; the name, it must be confessed, is very far from being philosophical; it was however derived from the fact of their not being essential to the mere nature or constitution of living animals, and which, besides the aliment, in-eluded air, exercise, sleep, the excretions, and passions of the mind.

4. It has been affirmed, with an air of much confidence, that the management of our diet requires not the aid of reason or philosophy, since Nature has implanted in us instincts sufficiently strong and intelligible to direct us to what is salutary, and to warn us from such aliments as are injurious. We may observe in reply, that man has so long forsaken the simple laws which Nature had instituted for his direction, that it is to be feared she has abandoned her charge, and left him under the control of that faithless guide and usurper, to which civilization has given dominion. Hunger, which expresses the true wants of the system, can no longer be distinguished from that feeling which induces us to prefer one species of food to another, and to seek it at the most improper periods of the day. Nor must it be forgotten that, during disease, the senses frequently lose their tact, and the invalid experiences an appetite for objects that would be prejudicial. That the natural relations which subsist between the qualities of food and the impressions made by them on the senses, are changed or destroyed by the refinements of artificial life, is a fact supported by too many powerful arguments to refute: how many kinds of aliments, originally disagreeable, become pleasant by habit; and how many substances, naturally agreeable, become disgusting from the creation of certain prejudices! I am acquainted with a lady who is constantly made sick by eating a green oyster; the cause of which may be traced to an erroneous impression she received with respect to the nature of the colouring matter being cupreous.

It has also been frequently observed, that persons in social life have acquired a preternatural sensibility to vegetable odours, while the savage has a keener sense for the exhalations of animal bodies: we are, for instance, assured by Captain Cook, that the people of Kamschatka did not smell a vegetable essence placed near them, but that they discovered, by their olfactory sense, a rotten fish, or a stranded whale, at a considerable distance.

5. Dr. George Fordyce has urged a still more serious and conclusive objection to that hackneyed maxim that we ought to live naturally, and on such food as is presented to us by nature; viz. that man has no natural food. It is decreed that he shall earn his bread by the sweat of his brow; or, in other words, that he shall by his industry, discover substances from which he is to procure subsistence; and that, if he cannot find such he must cultivate and alter them from their natural state. There is scarcely a vegetable which we at present employ, that can be found growing naturally. Buffon states, that our wheat is a factitious production, raised to its present condition by the art of agriculture. Rice, rye, barley, or even oats, are not to be found wild; that is to say, growing naturally in any part of the earth, but have been altered, by the industry of mankind, from plants not now resembling them even in such a degree as to enable us to recognize their relations. The acrid and disagreeable opium graveolens has been thus transformed into delicious celery: and the colewort, a plant of scanty leaves, not weighing altogether half an ounce, has been improved into cabbage, whose leaves alone weigh many pounds, or into a cauliflower of considerable dimensions, being only the embryo of a few buds, which, in their natural state, would not have weighed many grains.