which thicken the blood, are soldiers,
sailors, porters, organ-grinders, and cabmen:
if we may so translate into modern English,
the old Dutch pipers and coachmen. The
diabolical apathy with which the organ-
grinders grin over the tortures they inflict,
can therefore be conquered by a compulsory
bleeding and water-gruelling act.

Moonshine might possibly be turned to
some account; for Dr. Lemne tells us that
moonshine causes plants and men to grow
and become juicy. But only sunshine
ripens them. Moonshine may have
something to do with a mystery explained by
Dr. Lemne in the case of a Dutch lady
who was, as she wished to be, loving her
lord. Seeing a juicy man go by, she longed
for a bite out of him. Knowing that ladies
should at certain times on no account be
thwarted, this obliging gentleman
good-naturedly stopped and permitted her to
bite a mouthful from his arm. She ate it
with much relish, and then begged hard
for another bite. But there are limits to
the most accommodating temper, and the
gentleman declined to allow any more of
himself to be eaten. The Dutch lady
thereupon fell into extreme distress, and
her lord presently found twins in his house:
one living, and one dead. The one living
was the one which had been succoured by
the bit of live man which a wise instinct
had imperiously demanded for it. The
dead child was the unfortunate young
person in whose behalf nature had pleaded in
vain to the juicy stranger.

In the unwholesome districts of Holland,
in Dr. Lemne's time, the labouring classes
were much troubled with worms. Dr.
Lemne accounts for all the proceedings of
the worms by their great sagacity, as being
of the brood of the great serpent. If no
bounds were set to the powers of the devil,
man could not live. Therefore, because
bounds have been set, the diseases of, and
the variations of character in, men, depend
much more upon the relative proportions
of the four humours—blood, yellow bile,
black bile, and phlegm—and upon their
mutations, chillings, boilings, conflicts with one
another, than upon bad spirits from the other
world afloat in them. Devils do get into
us and aggravate our humours, just as they
do get into the wind and the storm and
ride the thunderbolt. Devils and angels
blend themselves with everything in nature,
and so they can, and so they do, enter into
the humours of the body. But we are less
subject to them than to the great law of
the dependence of our constitutions on those
humours. Nor is it at all to be ascribed to
diabolical possession, but to be explained
scientifically, that sick people sometimes
speak in foreign languages which they
have never learned. If devils were the
cause of this, the sick could not be
physicked. Dr. Lemne takes for granted
that one of his purges would not operate
upon Satan. What would he care for
a spoonful of brimstone and treacle?
But these people who speak strange
languages when sick, as medical science well
understands, can have that symptom
removed by judicious treatment. The reason
of it is, that the mind contains within itself
notions of all things—kept down usually by
the weight of the body, as fire is smothered
under ashes. But when there is great
disturbance and heat among the humours,
the smoke created by so much burning rises
into the brain, and is so acrid that by
very torture it extorts from the brain its
latent capability of mastering, say, Greek,
Hebrew, or Spanish. There is so violent
an ebullition among the powers of the mind
that they clash together, and strike out
any knowledge of which a human mind is
capable, just, says Dr. Lemne, as sparks
are struck out by the knocking together of
flint and steel. This, perhaps, may
account for the old-fashioned schoolmaster's
practice of shaking a child, or giving him
some violent knocks on the head, when the
required sparks of knowledge could not be
made to fly out by the ordinary method of
tuition. It is the philosophical groundwork,
also, of the old boarding-school
dumpling, the recipe for which will be
valued by Sir William Armstrong and
other constructors of irresistible artillery.
If it be not already lost to civilisation, it
should be sent to the War Office by any
surviving manufacturer of that piece of
solid shot, or of that more terrible loaded
shell, the Saturday Pie, which, with its
dangerous contents, threw into a most
horrible commotion all the humours of
those bodies into which it entered. What
linguists some of us ought to have been in
our boyhood!

Our doctor also discusses air in the
lungs, and tells a story he heard from
the great anatomist, Vesalius, of a
large-lunged Moorish diver at Ferrara. Without
drawing breath, he uttered a prolonged
shout, equal to the successive shouts of four
trained pugilists. And afterwards he
fought those pugilists, with his nostrils
and mouth closed. When this man with a
long breath was, for some offence, to be