132 A TOUR KOXJND MT GARDEN. 



ment, that a door must be either open or shut. Our logicians 

 forget that a door may be left ajar. If the phryganea were 

 to close up its dwelling tightly at both ends, it would no 

 longer be in the water; or at least the water, which would be 

 confined with it, being never renewed, would in a short time 

 lose the qualities necessary for supporting life. It spins a 

 little grating at the two extremities of its habitation, aad 

 then a cable, which it fastens to some blades of grass upon 

 the bank ; this done, it sleeps in tranquillity, awaiting a more 

 happy and a more brilliant life : it falls asleep in the water, 

 to awake in the sunshine and the beautiful blue of the air. 



Here, with its roots almost in the water, is a tusdlage, 

 vulgarly called coUs foot, doubtless on account of the form 

 and size of its leaves. Its leaves, which are round and as 

 large as the palm of the hand, will not appear before summer; 

 at present it only shows its blossoms. It is the earliest of 

 aquatic flowers; it is a marguerite of a brilliant yellow, the 

 rays of which are as fine and slender as hairs. Ancient 

 medicine, with Hippocrates at its head, for a long time at- 

 tributed to this flower a salutary influence upon the lungs ; 

 its name, tussilage, implies that it would remove cough. It 

 was by its means that coughs and catarrhal affections were 

 treated, till science, never stopping in its progress, discovered 

 that it produced no effect, either upon the lungs or their 

 diseases, and that it was good for nothing but to adorn the 

 banks of rivulets in the spring— quite a sufficient merit too. 

 Unfortunately, it was not till the end of about a thousand 

 years that science arrived at a conviction upon this point. 

 Nevertheless we still find, in almost all medical laboratories, 

 a large bottle with a red and gold label, upon which is written 

 Tussilago farfara. It is but one bottle the more, and forms 

 part of the decoration of the laboratory. 



Most doctors — I say most, in order to except justly some 

 whom I love with all my heart — most doctors are like sorcerers, 

 who prefer telling you what is being done at that same 

 moment by the great Mogul in his court, to informing you 

 what it is o'clock by the watch they have in their pockets. 



Physicians cure the plague, of which some deny the exist- 

 ence, and which is unknown in our climates — leprosy, which 

 no longer exists but in the East and in books; but they 



