42 



DE. R. ANGUS SMITH ON ANCIENT AND 



the neighbourhood,) or if he puts in earthenware sewers, and 

 makes it water-tight with pitch from the inexhaustible sources 

 on the banks of the Euphrates. The size is for grandeur, the 

 sewer becomes an absolute necessity in a large house; the 

 mind that constructs the rooms can construct the drains, or 

 perhaps the inferior work may be left to inferior agents, and 

 one most useful invention of these few years was in all pro- 

 bability carried out by some wretched inhabitant of a mud 

 hut in the neighbourhood. Neither when this same king, 

 or even petty savage chief, seeks a drier room or hut and a 

 warmer couch, does he seem to have the least thanks due to 

 him for beginning to teach us that the cold beds on the heath 

 or in the morass are favourable to ague and to fever ; on the 

 contrary, these generally seem to have felt themselves in the 

 wrong, being ashamed of their indulgences, and not without 

 a cause : but from the observation of such beginnings that 

 middle course must have arisen which teaches us that neither 

 in the degradation of luxury or of want, can the use of the 

 faculties of men be fully obtained. The effects of indulgence 

 have often led by reaction to the most contrary habits. In a 

 country at various periods given to excessive sloth, was found 

 the home of the most energetic huntsmen ; and the description 

 given by Xenophon of the exercises of the Persian youth, 

 shows that attention to personal health was carefully studied, 

 and, in many respects, well understood. 



In Egypt, too, where whole strata of extinct habits have 

 been recently dug up, we find remains of sanitary economy 

 among those of pomp and rule, — sometimes beside supersti- 

 tion, or in the happier neighbourhood of taste or of religious 

 feeling. Their physicians were considered admirable, and 

 no doubt that observing nation must have made much pro- 

 gress, with such a complete organization of learned men, 

 appointed to cure each his own department of the body. 

 The organization of that body showed also a something more 

 than a mere regard to personal health ; it was an attention 



