It is in this part of India by every medical practitioner. universally acknowledged by the doctors of all colours, of all casts, and of all countries. The people are taught to believe it in their infancy, and as they grow up, they acknowledge it from experience. I suppose that in the northern latitudes this power of the moon is far less sensible than in India. Here we universally think that the state of weakly and diseased bodies is much influenced by its motions. Every full and change increases the number of the patients of every practitioner. That the human body is affected in a remarkable manner by them I am perfectly convinced, and that an attention to the power of the moon is highly necessary to the medical practitioner in India." This passage tends to confirm, what indeed no judicious person can doubt, that the application of astrology to medicine, though it was soon perverted, and debased till it became a mere craft, originated in actual observations of the connection between certain bodily affections, and certain times and seasons. Many, if not most of the mischievous systems in physic and divinity have arisen from dim perceptions or erroneous apprehensions of some important truth. And not a few have originated in the common error of drawing bold and hasty inferences from weak premises. Sailors say, what they of all men have most opportunities of observing, that the moon as it rises clears the sky of clouds: "A puesta del sol," says a Spanish chronicler, “parescio la luna, e comio poco a poco todas las nuves." The "learned and reverend" Dr. Goad, some time master of Merchant Tailors' School, published a work "of vast pains, reading, and many years experience," which he called "Astro-Meteorologia, or a Demonstration of the Influences of the Stars in the Alterations of the Air; proving that there is not an earthquake, comet, parhelia, halo, thunder storm or tempest, or any other phenomena, but is referable to its particular planetary aspect, as the subsolar cause thereof." CHAPTER XCIII. P. I. REMARKS OF AN IMPATIENT READER ANTICIPATED AND ANSWERED, Ω πολλὰ λέξας ἄρτι κάνόνητ ̓ ἔπη, SOPHOCLES. NOVEL readers are sometimes so impatient to know how the story is to end, that they look at the last chapter, and so -escape, should I say-or forfeit that state of agitating suspense in which it was the author or authoress's endeavour VOL. II.-14 Balfour says, "there is no room to doubt that the human frame is affected by the influences connected with the relative situations of the sun and moon. In certain states of health and vigour this influence has not power to show itself by any obvious effects, and in such cases its existence is often not acknowledged. But in certain states of debility and disease it is able to manifest itself by exciting febrile paroxysms. Such paroxysms show themselves more frequently during the period of the spring tides, and as these advance become more violent and obstinate, and on the other hand tend no less invariably to subside and terminate during the recess." "I have no doubt," says this practitioner, "that any physician who will carefully attend to the diurnal and nocturnal returns of the tides, and will constantly hold before him the prevailing tendency of fevers to appear at the commencement, and during the period of the spring; and to subside and terminate at the commencement and during the period of the recess, will soon obtain more information respecting the phenomena of fevers, and be able to form more just and certain judgments and prognostics respecting every event, than if he were to study the history of medicine, as it is now written, for a thousand years. There is no revolution or change in the course of fevers that may not be explained by these general principles in a manner consistent with the laws of the human constitution, and of the great system of revolving bodies which unite together in producing them." Dr. Balfour spared no pains in collecting information to elucidate and confirm his theory during the course of thirty years' practice in India. He communicated upon it with most of the European practitioners in the company's dominions; and the then governor-general, Lord Teignmouth, considered the subject as so important, that he properly as well as liberally ordered the correspondence and the treatise, in which its results were imbodied, to be printed and circulated at the expense of the government. The author drew up his scheme of an astronomical ephemeris, for the purposes of medicine and meteorology, and satisfied himself that he had discovered the laws of febrile paroxysms, and unfolded a history and theory of fevers entirely new, consistent with itself in every part, and with the other appearances of nature, perfectly conformable to the laws discovered by the immortal Newton, and capable of producing important improvements in medicine and meteorology. He protested against objections to his theory as if it were connected with the wild and groundless delusions of astrology. Yet the letter of his correspondent, Dr. Helenus Scott, of Bombay, shows how naturally and inevitably it would be connected with them in that country. "The influence of the moon on the human body," says that physician, "has been observed in this part of India by every medical practitioner. It is universally acknowledged by the doctors of all colours, of all casts, and of all countries. The people are taught to believe it in their infancy, and as they grow up, they ac knowledge it from experience. I suppose that in the northern latitudes this power of the moon is far less sensible than in India. Here we universally think that the state of weakly and diseased bodies is much influenced by its motions. Every full and change increases the number of the patients of every practitioner. That the human body is affected in a remarkable manner by them I am perfectly convinced, and that an attention to the power of the moon is highly necessary to the medical practitioner in India." This passage tends to confirm, what indeed no judicious person can doubt, that the application of astrology to medicine, though it was soon perverted, and debased till it became a mere craft, originated in actual observations of the connection between certain bodily affections, and certain times and seasons. Many, if not most of the mischievous systems in physic and divinity have arisen from dim perceptions or erroneous apprehensions of some important truth. And not a few have originated in the common error of drawing bold and hasty inferences from weak premises. Sailors say, what they of all men have most opportunities of observing, that the moon as it rises clears the sky of clouds: "A puesta del sol," says a Spanish chronicler, "parescio la luna, e comio poco a poco todas las nuves.' The "learned and reverend" Dr. Goad, some time master of Merchant Tailors' School, published a work "of vast pains, reading, and many years experience," which he called "Astro-Meteorologia, or a Demonstration of the Influences of the Stars in the Alterations of the Air; proving that there is not an earthquake, comet, parhelia, halo, thunder storm or tempest, or any other phenomena, but is referable to its particular planetary aspect, as the subsolar cause thereof." CHAPTER XCIII. P. I. REMARKS OF AN IMPATIENT READER ANTICIPATED AND ANSWERED. Ω πολλὰ λέξας ἄρτι κάνόνητ ̓ ἔπη, SOPHOCLES. NOVEL readers are sometimes so impatient to know how the story is to end, that they look at the last chapter, and so -escape, should I say—or forfeit that state of agitating suspense in which it was the author or authoress's endeavour VOL. II.-14 to keep them till they should arrive by a regular perusal at the well-concealed catastrophe. It may be apprehended that persons of this temper, having in their composition much more of Eve's curiosity than of Job's patience, will regard with some displeasure a work like the present, of which the conclusion is not before them; and some, perhaps, may even be so unreasonable as to complain that they go through chapter after chapter without making any progress in the story. "What care the public," says one of these readers, (for every reader is a self-constituted representative of that great invisible body,) "what do the public care for astrology and almanacs, and the influence of the tides upon diseases, and Mademoiselle des Roches's flea, and the Koran, and the chronology of this fellow's chapters, and Potteric Carr, and the corporation of Doncaster, and the theory of signatures, and the philosophy of the alchymists, and the devil knows what besides! What have these things to do with the subject of the book, and who would ever have looked for them in a novel!" "A novel do you call it, Mr. Reader?" "Yes, Mr. Author, what else should I call it? It has been reviewed as a novel and advertised as a novel." "I confess that in this very day's newspaper it is advertised in company with four new novels; the first in the list being Warleigh, or the Fatal Oak,' a Legend of Devon, by Mrs. Bray; the second, Dacre,' edited by the Countess of Morley; Mr. James's 'Life and Adventures of John Marston Hall' is the third; fourthly, comes the dear name of 'The Doctor;' and last in the list, The Court of Sigismund Augustus, or Poland in the Seventeenth Century. 6 I present my compliments to each and all of the authoresses and authors with whom I find myself thus associated. At the same time I beg leave to apologize for this apparent intrusion into their company, and to assure them that the honour which I have thus received has been thrust upon me. Dr. Stegman had four patients whose disease was that they saw themselves double: "they perceived," says Mr. Turner, "another self, exterior to themselves!" I am not one of Dr. Stegman's patients; but I see myself double in a certain sense, and in that sense have another and distinct self-the one incog., the other out of cog. Out of cog. I should be as willing to meet the novelist of the Polish court, as any other unknown brother or sister of the quill. Out of cog. I should be glad to shake hands with Mr. James, converse with him about Charlemagne, and urge him to proceed with his French biography. Out of cog. I should have much pleasure in making my bow to Lady Morley or her editee. Out of cog. I should like to be introduced to Mrs. Bray in her own lovely land of Devon, and see the sweet innocent face of her humble friend Mary Colling. But without a proper introduction I should never think of presenting myself to any of these persons; and having incog. the same sense of propriety as out of cog., I assure them that the manner in which my one self has been associated with them is not the act and deed of my other self, but that of Messrs. Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green, and Longman, my very worthy and approved good publishers. 66 Why, Mr. Author, you do not mean to say that the book is not printed as a novel, does not appear as one, and is not intended to pass for one? Have you the face to deny it?" 66 Lecteur, mon ami, la demande est bien faite sans doute, et bien apparente; mais la response vous contentera, ou j'ai le sens malgallefretu!" "Lecteur, mon ami! an incog. has no face. But this I say in the face, or in all the faces of that public which has more heads than a Hindoo divinity, that the character and contents of the book were fairly, fully, carefully, and considerately denoted that is to say, notified or made known in the title page. Turn to it, I entreat you, sir! The first thing which you cannot but notice, is, that it is in motley. Ought you not to have inferred, concerning the author, that in his brain he hath strange places cramm'd With observation, the which he vents In mangled forms?* And if you could fail to perceive the conspicuous and capacious &c., which in its omnisignificance may promise anything, and yet pledges the writer to nothing; and if you could also overlook the mysterious monograph your attention was invited to all this by a sentence of Butler's, on the opposite page, so apposite that it seems as if he had * Shakspeare. |