O BLESSED health! cried my father, making an exclamation, as he turned
over the leaves to the next chapter, thou art before all gold and
treasure; ’tis thou who enlargest the soul,—and openest all its powers
to receive instruction and to relish virtue.—He that has thee, has
little more to wish for;—and he that is so wretched as to want
thee,—wants every thing with thee.
I have concentrated all that can be said upon this important head, said
my father, into a very little room, therefore we’ll read the chapter
quite through.
My father read as follows:
“The whole secret of health depending upon the due contention for
mastery betwixt the radical heat and the radical moisture”—You have
proved that matter of fact, I suppose, above, said _Yorick._
Sufficiently, replied my father.
In saying this, my father shut the book,—not as if he resolved to read
no more of it, for he kept his fore-finger in the chapter:——nor
pettishly,—for he shut the book slowly; his thumb resting, when he had
done it, upon the upper-side of the cover, as his three fingers
supported the lower side of it, without the least compressive
violence.——
I have demonstrated the truth of that point, quoth my father, nodding
to _Yorick_, most sufficiently in the preceding chapter.
Now could the man in the moon be told, that a man in the earth had
wrote a chapter, sufficiently demonstrating, That the secret of all
health depended upon the due contention for mastery betwixt the
_radical heat_ and the _radical moisture_,—and that he had managed the
point so well, that there was not one single word wet or dry upon
radical heat or radical moisture, throughout the whole chapter,—or a
single syllable in it, _pro_ or _con_, directly or indirectly, upon the
contention betwixt these two powers in any part of the animal œconomy——
“O thou eternal Maker of all beings!”—he would cry, striking his breast
with his right hand (in case he had one)—“Thou whose power and goodness
can enlarge the faculties of thy creatures to this infinite degree of
excellence and perfection,—What have we MOONITES done?”