repair, the brain is the sovereign ajint by night
and day; and the blood the great living material;
and digestible food th' indispensible supply.
And this balance of exhaustion and repair is too
nice to tamper with; disn't a single sleepless
night, or dinnerless day, write some pallor on the
face, and tell against the buddy? So does a
single excessive perspiration, a trifling diary, or
a cut finger, though it takes but half an ounce of
blood out of the system. And what is the cause
of that rare ivint — it occurs only to pashints that
can't afford docking — Dith from old age? Think
ye the man really succumms under years, or is
mowed down by Time? Nay, yon's just Potry
an Bosh. Nashins have been thinned by the
lancet, but niver by the scythe; and years are
not forces, but misures of evints. No,
Centenarius decays and dies, bekase his bodil'
expinditure goes on; and his bodil' income lessens
by failure of the reparative and reproductive
forces. And now suppose bodil' exhaustion
and repair were a mere matter of pecuniary,
instid of vital, economy; what would you say to
the steward, or housekeeper, who, to balance
your accounts and keep you solvint, should open
every known channel of expinse with one hand,
and with the other — stop the supplies? Yet this is
how the Dockers for thirty cinturies have burned
th' human candle at both ends, yet wondered the
light of life expired under their hands."

"It seems irrational. Then in my daughter's
case you would—"

"Looksee! A pashint falls sick. What haps
directly? Why the balance is troubled, and
exhaustion exceeds repair. For proof, obsairve the
buddy when Disease is fresh!

      And you will always find a loss of flesh.

To put it economikly, and then you must
understand it, been a housekeeper—

       Whativer the Disease, its form, or essence,
       Expinditure goes on, and income lessens.

To this sick and therefore weak man, enter a
Docker purblind with cinturies of Cant, Pricidint,
Blood, and Goose Greece; imagines him a fiery
pervalid, though the common sense of mankind,
through its interpreter common language,
pronounces him, what he is and looks, an 'invalid,'
gashes him with a lancet, spills out the great
liquid material of all repair by the gallon, and
fells this weak man, wounded now, and pale, and
fainting, with Dith stamped on his face, to th'
earth, like a bayoneted soldier or a slaughtered
ox. If the weak man, wounded thus and weakened,
survives, then the chartered Thugs who have
drained him by the bunghole, turn to and drain
him by the spigot; they rake him, and then blister
him, and then calomel him: and lest Nature
should have the ghost of a chance to
counterbalance these frightful outgoings, they keep
strong meat and drink out of his system emptied
by their stabs, bites, purges, mercury, and blisters;
damdijjits! And that, Asia exciptcd, was
profissional Midicine from Hippocrates to Sampsin;
Antiphlogistic is but a modern name
for an ass-ass-inating routine which has niver
varied a hair since scholastic midicine, the silliest
and didliest of all the hundred forms of
Quackery, first rose — unlike Sceince, Art, Religion,
and all true Suns — in the West ; to wound
the sick; to weaken the weak ; and mutilate the
hurt ; and — THIN MANKIND !"

The voluble impugner of his own profession
delivered these two last words in thunder so
sudden and effective as to strike Julia's work out
of her hands. But here, as in Nature, a moment's
pause followed the thunderclap; so Mrs.
Dodd, who had long been patiently watching her
opportunity, smothered a shriek, and edged in a
word: "This is irresistible; you have confuted
everybody; to their hearts' content: and now
the question is, what course shall we substitute?"
She meant, "in the great case, which occupies
me." But Sampson attached a nobler, wider,
sense to her query.

"What course? Why the great Chronothairmal
practice, based on the remittent and febrile
character of all disease; above all, on

               The law of Perriodicity, a law
      Whence Midicine yet has wells of light to draw.

By Remittency, I mean th' ebb of Disease, by
Perriodicity, th' ebb and also the flow, the
paroxysm and the remission. These remit and
recur, and keep time like the tides, not in ague
and remittent fever only, as the Profission
imagines to this day, but in all diseases from a
Scirrhus in the Pylorus t' a toothache. And
I discovered this, and the new paths to cure of
all diseases it opens. Alone I did it: and what
my reward? hooted, insulted, belied, and called
a quack, by the banded school of profissional
assassins, who, in their day hooted Harvey and
Jinner, authors too of great discoveries, but
discoveries narrow in their consequences compared
with mine. T' appreciate Chronothairmalism, ye
must begin at the beginning; so just answer me
—What is Man?"

At this huge inquiry whirring up all in a
moment, like a cock pheasant in a wood, Mrs.
Dodd sank back in her chair despondent. Seeing
her hors de combat, Sampson turned to Julia
and demanded, twice as loud, "WHAT IS MAN?"
Julia opened two violet eyes at him, and then
looked at her mother for a hint how to proceed.

"How can that child answer such a question?"
sighed Mrs. Dodd. " Let us return to the point."

"I have never strayed an inch from it. It's
about Young Physic."

"No, excuse me, it is about a young lady.
Universal Medicine! what have I to do with that?"

"Now this is the way with them all," cried
Sampson, furious; "there lowed John Bull. The
men and women of this benighted nashin have an
ear for anything; provided it matters nothing:
Talk Jology, Conchology, Entomology, Theology,
Meteorology, Astronomy, Deuteronomy, Botheronomy,
or Boshology, and one is listened to with
riverence, because these are all far-off things in
fogs; but at a word about the great, near, useful