lessness, till we recollect that the seat of our brain may, perhaps, be in our stomach, rather than in the pineal gland of Descartes; and that the most artificial logic, to make us somewhat reasonable, may be swallowed with the "blue pill," or any other in vogue. Our domestic happiness often depends on the state of our biliary and digestive organs; and the little disturbances of conjugal life may be more efficaciously cured by the physician than the moralist-for a sermon misapplied will never act so directly as a sharp medicine.

The learned Gaubius, an eminent doctor of medicine at Leyden, who called himself a "professor of the passions," gives the case of a lady of too inflammable a constitution, whom her husband, unknown to herself, had gradually reduced to a model of decorum by phlebotomy. Her complexion indeed lost the roses, which some, perhaps, had too wantonly admired for the repose of her conjugal affection.

There are unquestionably, constitutional moral disorders; some good-tempered but passionate persons have acknowledged that they cannot avoid those fits to which they are liable, and which they say they always suffered from a child." If they arise from too great a fulness of the blood, is it not cruel to upbraid rather than cure them, which might easily be done by taking away the redundant humours, and thus quieting the most passionate man alive?

A patient who allows his brain to be disordered by the fumes of liquor, instead of being suffered to be a ridiculous being, might have an opiate (premised by

an emetic) prescribed; for in laying him asleep as soon as possible, you remove the cause of his madness. There are crimes for which men are hanged, but of which they might have been cured by physical means. Persons out of their senses with love, by throwing themselves into a river, and being dragged out nearly lifeless, have recovered their senses, and lost their bewildering passion. Submersion was discovered to be a cure for some mental disorders, by altering the state of the body, as Van Helmont notices, "was happily practised in England." With the circumstance to which this sage of chemistry alludes we are unacquainted; but this extraordinary practice was certainly known to the Italians; for, in one of the tales of Poggio, we find a mad-doctor of Milan, who was celebrated for curing lunatics and demoniacs in a certain time. His practice consisted in placing them in a great high-walled court-yard, in the midst of which there was a deep well, full of water, as cold as ice. When a demoniac was brought to this physician, he had the patient bound to a pillar in the well, till the water ascended to the knees, or higher, and even to the neck, as he deemed the malady required. In their bodily pain they appear to have forgotten their disease; thus, by the terrors of the repetition of cold water, a man appears to have been frightened into his

senses.

A case is related of a remarkable nature of a lady who had resolved upon destroying herself; with this intention she swallowed more than half a pint of lau

danum; she closed her curtains in the evening, bade farewell to her attendants, and flattered herself she should never awake from her sleep. In the morning, however, notwithstanding this incredible dose, she awoke in the agonies of death. By the usual means she was enabled to get rid of the poison she had so largely taken, and, not only recovered her life, but which is more extraordinary, her perfect senses! The physician who was called in to the case naturally conjectured, that it was the influence of her disordered mind over her body which prevented this vast quantity of laudanum from its usual action by terminating in death.

Camus, a French physician, who combined literature with science, the author of "Abdeker, or the Art of Cosmetics," which he discovered in exercise and temperance, produced another beneficial work, written in 1733, "La Médicine de l'Esprit." His conjectural cases are at least as numerous as his more positive facts; for he is not wanting in imagination. Insisting that natural causes force the soul and body to act together, the defects of the intellectual operations depend on those of the organization, which may be altered or destroyed by physical causes; and he properly adds, that we are to consider that the soul is material, because, while existing in matter, it is operated on by matter. Such is the theory of "La Médicine de l'Esprit," which, though it will never be quoted by physicians, may nevertheless contain some facts deserving of their attention.

A recent writer seems to have been struck with these and other analogies. Mr. Haslam, in his work on Sound Mind, says, "there seems to be a considerable similarity between the morbid state of the instruments of voluntary motion (the body), and certain affections of the mental power (the mind). Thus, paralysis has its counterpart in the defects of recollection, where the utmost endeavour to remember is ineffectually exerted. Tremor may be compared with incapability of fixing the attention; and this involuntary state of muscles, ordinarily subjected to the will, also finds a parallel where the mind loses its influence in the train of thoughts, and becomes subject to spontaneous intrusions, as may be exemplified in reveries, dreams, and some species of madness.

Let us now see how the varieties of constitutions are applicable to different tempers, according to the philosophy of the ancient physicians; and how far they are borne out by modern experience and observation.

SECTION II.

SOME PRELIMINARY REMARKS ON DIFFERENT
CONSTITUTIONS AND TEMPERS.

ACCORDING to Hippocrates, the human body contains four humours very different with respect to heat, cold, moisture, and dryness-namely, blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile; which several humours are frequently brought up by vomiting, and discharged in the opposite direction; that health consists in a due mixture of these four humours; and that distempers are produced by a redundancy in any of them. Upon this observation of the "father of physic," the four principal temperaments of choleric, melancholic, phlegmatic, and sanguine, have been established. But Galen, who was always partial to subtilities and divisions, has reckoned up nine kinds of constitutions, namely, four simple, the hot, the cold, the moist, and the dry; four compound, the hot and moist, the hot and dry, the cold and moist, the cold and dry; and one moderate healthy temperament, consisting in a mediocrity, inclining to no extreme.

As the most simple division, and that which will be here best understood, we shall prefer that of Hippocrates; and to convey a distinct idea of these constitutions, it