WRINKLES, REAL AND FIGURATIVE.

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and may come without any emaciation. Nay, so plain is this, that I have seen the plump smooth face of a man wrinkled in a fortnight: and I have seen his face again plump in a fortnight, by putting his stomach to rights. In this case the muscles drag the other soft parts downwards, and by their contraction form a furrow. Thus wrinkles, which are esteemed the figurative representations of wisdom, may be the staring evidences of the folly of a man who abuses his stomach. The best of all " wrinkles," (in the figurative sense,) is to know how to take care of the said stomach. Habitual swallowers of purgative drugs take on the wrinkled face at an early period, having sometimes previously passed through the stage of unnatural fat; the reason for both of which states will be clear from what has preceded.

So much for the variations, inflammatory, substantial, and nervous, that attend the progress of stomach and drug disease. They have been detailed in this place because it is essential that the reader should be acquainted with the diversified phenomena the disease in question gives rise to. Many a person, far gone in disorder of the alimen

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SELF-DECEPTION AND DIGESTION.

tary canal, and pestered with more or fewer of these signs, never thinks of referring them to their original source, so long as, by dint of taking tonics to enable him to get food into the stomach, and alteratives and purgatives to get it out of the stomach, he manages to drag through a few years of what he calls life. This process of cramming and then ramming down the charge he flatters himself is "digestion;" and I have been told that "the digestion was very good" by patients who, going through this daily ordnance exercise, came to consult me about diurnal, racking headaches, periodical attacks of tic-doloureux, cough, asthmatic breathing, flying rheumatism, palpitation of the heart, and such like ailments. They never dreamed that the food and the physic could do all this. Neither when I have said to them, "You are easily annoyed-small things vex you-you are more anxious than you used to beyou do not see matters in the cheerful light you did,” -could they imagine by what trick I had thus got cognizance of their innermost man. My readers will see, after reading up to this point, in what the trick consists-merely in the knowledge that if to "food and physic" in the belly, "fretting" in the brain be added in ever so small a degree, each must exasperate the other. Radiating from these

NATURE'S REMEDY.

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two centres of nervous power, each function of the body, each faculty of the mind, is liable to become the prey of diseased actions; no pain of the body, no agony of the mind is then a mystery: according to the amount of mischief ascertained to exist in the alimentary canal, may we predicate concerning the amount of physical and moral complaints of the same individual.

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Let, therefore, the man on whose mind cares of various kinds press, who at the same time is the subject of any of the ailments recited in the previous pages, and still more who is taking that clumsy remedy, physic, in the vain expectation of relieving those ailments,-let him, I say, ponder well the statements I have advanced; let him " read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest" them, (if his mind be not too far gone to digest a reasonable proposition.) They are written for his benefit: let him act upon them: let him test their truth: let him eschew the irrational treatment, which to an irritated part adds further irritation: and, over-leaping the moss-grown boundaries of old prejudice, and artificial practice, let him essay what Nature's remedy, regulated by a scientific acquaintance with the capabilities of the human frame, can do to eradicate

F

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ADVICE TO MEN OF BUSINESS.

the ills which " Art and Mystery"* have upraised in him.

Ye enterprising, princely merchants of England, whose ships carry out together with other wares, the intelligence and the useful arts of our glorious country, to bring back "the gold of Ormus and of Ind!" Ye sleepless-minded, ever-inventive manufacturers, who clothe the human race and give it wherewith to sow the seed and reap the fruits of the earth, and to shield it from the play of the elements, and, thus aiding its physical comfort, afford space for the cultivation of its mental being! Ye tradesmen, whose industry knows no rest, who early and late ply the traffic that, in your hope, is to reward you in the physical ease of declining age! Why is it that ye are blind to the fact that all this unceasing labour, this activity which dignifies the individual and advances the race, accumulating the means of bodily ease and mental culture, might be carried on with infinitely less of fretting and wear and tear of the mind, did you

* Such is the flattering title given to the science of healing in the exquisitely engraved diploma of the "Worshipful Company of Apothecaries of England!" Indeed it must be confessed that the entire document is a most tradesmanlike production :-and so far does them honour.

THE TRUE CORNUCOPIA.

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only withdraw from that sensitive organ, the stomach, the irritants which the wealth you gather up is too frequently applied in purchasing for it! Your career implies anxiety and irritation of the brain wherefore add that of the stomach to it? Could you but know the clearness, the vigour of the brain, the enormous amount of labour of which it is capable when no fumes of wine and indigestion reach its finely wrought but elastic texture, you would find the task to which have bound youryou selves, one of pleasure and a recreation;-fatiguing, only to ensure, not to repel, sleep from your bed; -wearing, only as it displaces the most laborious of all occupations-doing nothing. The best years of your life would not then be spent in the combined discomfort of constant pains-taking and constant physic-taking. The nightly pill would not then wait on the daily indigestion and ill humour, maintaining and augmenting both. Clear in mind, your affairs would run less risk of being confused. And in the midst of your career, when fortune is just commencing to pour the contents of her cornucopia on your counters, you would not, as is so often the case, be cut off in a moment, your tombstone marking your age at 45 years, when its erection might have been postponed twenty or thirty years longer. Or if you escape for period