200 Remarks on Madeira, Climate of the Tropics, 



Cervantes, Fielding, Marivaux, and SnioUet, the superiors in 

 my humble opinion of Le Sage, have shown better judgements 

 on this head. SmoUet, who on more accounts than one was the 

 best qualified in this respect, saw the proper openings for satire, 

 admirably entered into and traced them. 



That first-rate broker of episodes, however highly gifted he 

 was to retail to the world the wiles and hypocrisy of common 

 life, open alike to all mankind, was certainly unqualified to dive 

 into the mysteries of the medical profession, or to decry its pro- 

 fessors. Le Sage, not having studied and practised physic him- 

 self, could be in nowise authorized to judge of the unfitness of 

 evacuations, or to infer death as their necessary consequence. 

 This principle is finely enforced by numerous writers of the highest 

 rank, and by none more than by Homer, Horace, Pope, and 

 Goldsmith, who, in particular, with his usual naivete inveighs 

 against Peter the Great, and Locke, notwithstanding the powers 

 of his mind, and his partial attention to physic, for meddling with 

 the principles of a profession that can be radically learned only 

 by a knowledge of matter and nature in general, and by an inti- 

 mate acquaintance with the living and dead subject in every 

 stage and in every state. It is however well known that Le 

 Sage lived to recant what he had said in dispraise and derision 

 of a profession coeval with fallen man, and whose genuine pro- 

 fessors have been ever honoured by the first writers and charac- 

 ters of every age and country, on account of their indispensable 

 utility, and who, in the opinion of Swift *, should not only take 

 precedence of doctors of the canon or civil law, but should be 

 ranked in the first classes of the community, instead of the lower 

 order of nobility, as is on extraordinary occasions the case. 



People living in a state of mere nature will experience the 

 wants and dependencies of man, and privations will necessarily 

 prevail in all colonies at first. In those parts of the Brasiis where 

 I have been, they seemed to want the skill, or require the means, 

 necessary to render the mandible produce of the soil most con- 

 ducive to digestion, or, strictly speaking, to chymification, chyli- 

 fication, sanguification, and assimilation. Their staple article of 

 food is farinha, a coarse meal made from the root of the man- 

 dioca or casada plant f. It is made use of simply in its dry state 

 with water, after or on being mixed up in a decoction of fish, 



which 



* One of the three original writers in modern times, according to Voltaire. 

 Again, the curious reader can find what Blackstone has said in praise of 

 medical men. Thus we perceive a first-rate doctor of the canon law avow- 

 edly, and a first-rate doctor of the civil law indirectly, yielding the palm of 

 greasiest honour to the genuine medical professors. 



t Each family that I happened to notice has a handmill, with which the 

 root, on heing well scraped and washed, is ground ; after which it is pressed 



and 



