rper
and longer; but yet he may be deceived by the want of the comforts he
enjoyed at home. He cannot conceive any climate to agree better with the
constitution of the English, not being oppressed with extremity of heats,
nor nipped by biting cold:

"By which means, blessed be God, we enjoy our health, notwithstanding
those difficulties we have undergone, in such a measure as would have
been admired, if we had lived in England with the like means."

Edward Johnson, after mentioning the shifts to which they were put for
food, says,--

"And yet, methinks, our children are as cheerful, fat, and lusty, with
feeding upon those mussels, clams, and other fish, as they were in
England with their fill of bread."

Higginson, himself a dyspeptic, "continually in physic," as he says, and
accustomed to dress in thick clothing, and to comfort his stomach with
drink that was "both strong and stale,"--the "jolly good ale and old," I
suppose, of free and easy Bishop Still's song,--found that he both could
and did oftentimes drink New England water very well,--which he seems to
look upon as a remarkable feat. He could go as lightclad as any, too,
with only a light stuff cassock upon his shirt, and stuff breeches
without linings. Two of his children were sickly: one,--little misshapen
Mary,--died on the passage, and, in her father's words, "was the first in
our ship that was buried in the bowels of the great Atlantic sea;" the
other, who had been "most lamentably handled" by disease, recovered
almost entirely "by the very wholesomeness of the air, altering,
digesting, and drying up the cold and crude humors of the body."
Wherefore, he thinks it a wise course for all cold complexions to come to
take physic in New England, and ends with those often quoted words, that
"a sup of New England's air is better than a whole draught of Old
England's ale." Mr. Higginson died, however, "of a hectic fever," a
little more than a year after his arrival.

The medical records which I shall cite show that the colonists were not
exempt from the complaints of the Old World. Besides the common diseases
to which their descendants are subject, there were two others, to say
nothing of the dreaded small-pox, which later medical science has
disarmed,--little known among us at the present day, but frequent among
the first settlers. The first of these was the scurvy, already
mentioned, of which Winthrop speaks in 1630, saying, that it proved fatal
to those who