ABSTINENCE FROM FOOD. 
52d 
hundred and twelve ; and Romauld, one hundred and twenty. Bu- 
chanan mentions one Lawrence, who attained the age of one hundred 
and forty by temperance and labour ; and Spottiswood speaks of 
another person, named Kentigern, afterwards called St. Mongah or 
Mungo, who lived to one hundred and eighty-five by the same means. 
According to Dr. Cheyne, most of the chronic diseases, the infirmi- 
ties of old age, and the short lives of Englishmen, are owing to reple- 
tion ; and may be either cured, prevented, or remedied by abstinence. 
But a want of due care may prove extremely detrimental to the con- 
stitution ; for many have undoubtedly done themselves irreparable 
injury by fasting too long. 
Among animals, the serpent can endure an extraordinary degree of 
abstinence. Rattlesnakes have lived many months without any food, 
still retaining their vigour and fierceness. Dr. Shaw speaks of a cou- 
ple of cerastes, a sort of Egyptian serpents, which had been kept 
five years in a bottle closely corked, without any food, unless a small 
quantity of sand, in which they coiled themselves up, may be reckoned 
as such. When he saw them, they were as brisk and lively as if just 
taken. Many species pass four, five, or six months every year, with- 
out either eating or drinking, as the tortoise, bear, dormouse, serpent, 
&c. and are as fat and fleshy afterwards as before. Several species 
of birds, and almost the whole tribe of insects, subsist through the 
winter in a state of torpor, without food. 
In most instances of extraordinary human abstinence related by 
naturalists, there were apparent marks of a texture of blood and 
humours like that of the animals above mentioned. There are sub- 
stances of all kinds, animal, vegetable, &c, floating in the atmosphere, 
which must be continually taken in by respiration ; and that an 
animal body may be nourished by them, is evident in the instance of 
vipers, which if taken when first brought forth, and kept from every 
thing but air, will grow considerably in a few days. The eggs of 
lizards are observed to increase in bulk after they are produced, 
though there be nothing but air, as the eggs or spawn of fishes are 
nourished with the water. 
Pliny says, a person may live seven days without any food whatever, 
and that many people have continued more than eleven days without 
either food or drink. Hist, Nat. lib. ii. c. 54. — Petrus d’Abono says, 
there was in his time in Normandy, a \voman thirty years of age, who 
bad lived without food for eighteen years. Exposit. Ult. prob. x. — 
Alexander Benedictus mentions a person at Venice who lived forty-six 
years without food. Tract, lib. xii. c. 11 . — Joubertus relates that a 
woman lived in very good health for three years without food or 
drink, and that he saw another who had lived to her tenth year with- 
out either food or drink. —Clausius, et Garcia ab Horto, mention 
that some of the more rigid Banians in India abstain from food fre- 
quently for twenty days together. Hist. Arom. lib. i. — Albertus 
Krantzius says, that a hermit in the mountains, in the canton of 
Schwitz, lived twenty years without food. Hist. Eccles. lib. xii. c. 21. — 
Guaguinus says, that Louis the Pious, emperor and king of France, 
who died in 840, existed the last forty days of his life without food or 
drink. Hist. Francor. lib. v.—Citois gives the history of a girl at 
