PROLEGOMENON. 17 



This is a subject of surprise: a treatise on "Airs, Waters, 

 and Places" has been in existence twenty-three centuries, 

 and a world of human creatures have been groping their 

 way through life, bowed down by the curse of a host of 

 diseases, existence darkened and imbittered by pain and 

 suffering from infirmities which could have been cured by 

 the magical power of "airs, waters, and places," whose 

 jubilant song of physical redemption had been shouted 

 more than four hundred years before the arrival of the 

 Christian religion upon earth; before the Nazarene youth 

 had ravished the ear of suffering man with the melodies 

 of his voice upon the precious problems of the " blessed 

 life" and the salvation of the soul. 



" Were man to live coeval with the sun, 

 The patriarch-pupil would be learning still." 



Unhappy star-gazer ! he is looking to the heavens for 

 succor, when it is under his feet; he goes through elaborate 

 processes of medication under renowned wisdom, or vic- 

 timizes himself by the mummeries of quackery, as in the 

 multiplex soakings and pourings of hydropathy, or the 

 delusive efforts at swallowing the fantastic shadows-of- 

 shades of homoeopathic globules, whilst " in every path he 

 treads down that which doth befriend him when sickness makes 

 him pale and wan.' 1 Impressed with the conviction of the 

 infinite wisdom and perfection of all things, that each 

 object is " full of use and duty," that Nature is always 

 man's obedient servant, and as a patient donkey will carry 

 her liege-lord like a king, that she invites him forever to 

 study and learn her ways, which are surely wisdom, and 

 to obey her decalogue, which is always peace, and which is 

 written in stars and grass-blades as well as blood-globules and 

 palpitating viscera, and as clearly legible in the laws of health 

 and disease as in sidereal systems and the soul; that man's 

 apparent dislocation with Nature is purely accidental ; that 

 he may become a "garden in a paradise/' growing with 

 the milk of the corn, flowing with the blood of the grape ; 

 that the gulf so deep and wide is not in Nature, but in man 



