Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/742

722 since the fighting of un-nature first became a science. If contradictory tenets imply error, we surely are further from unitary truth here than anywhere except in the Babel of speculative theology; and even there only dogmatic assertion, but not inconsistency, could ever go further. Just compare the gospel of Pythagoras with that of Dr. Brown, the Berwick prophet. Abstinence from wine—alcoholic stimulants, we would say at present—and from all animal food is the keystone of the Pythagorean system, which also denounced the shedding of blood, and recommended the use of "food which needs no cooking"—fruit, nuts, honey, milk, and the like. But John H. Brown, M. D., divides all possible states of health into the "sthenic and asthenic conditions," the first to be toned down by bleeding, cathartics, etc., the second to be rallied by a liberal use of brandy and strong meats, which in more moderate quantities are to constitute our normal food, while all raw vegetable products are to be avoided, especially "acid and subacid fruit."

Is there a greater antagonism in all the toto-cœlo distance from Odin to Mother Ann Lee? If either was right, the other must have been portentously wrong; yet the school of Berwick, not less than that of Samos, counted its disciples by tens of thousands. Again, is there an hygienic tenet which seems more incontrovertible to us than the propriety of the three daily meals? Yet the Romans of the ante-Cæsarean era, who as physical beings were so strangely superior to us, restricted themselves to a single meal in the twenty-four hours, for which they chose the very time when we dread repletion most—the end of the day, the hour between sunset and darkness.

Moses transmits from the lips of Jehovah his by-laws against pork and rabbit-flesh, and we know how many of his followers preferred death to the obnoxious diet, but our Saxon forefathers exalted the pigs' feet of Valhalla as the supreme reward of heroic virtue, and, dying, the Baresark could grin through his tortures at the thought of celestial spareribs. Charlemagne, when informed that his life depended on a change of régime, declared that if he could purchase immortality by absenting himself from the customary tri-weekly barbecues, he would think the price too high. He may have doubted the efficacy of the sacrifice, but the Mingrelian ambassadors, after receiving Abu-Hassan's stern ultimatum, "Islam or the sword!" informed him that, however willing they might be to propitiate the wrath of Allah, the national assembly preferred war and pork to peace without it.

Thales considered water as the summum bonum, and many of his teachings seem to anticipate the hydropathic school and our temperance dogmas; but Paracelsus proclaimed to the world that he had found the true panacea and the elixir of life by the discovery of alcohol, and seems to have been only too successful in his propaganda. "He finds believers who himself believes"; and Paracelsus certainly proved personal confidence in his doctrine by swallowing (in the city of Salzburg, 1541), as the "grand quintessence of life," a five-pint bottle of alcohol,