t 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 oeconomy--

'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?'

Chapter 3.XXXIV.

With two strokes, the one at Hippocrates, the other at Lord Verulam, did
my father achieve it.

The stroke at the prince of physicians, with which he began, was no more
than a short insult upon his sorrowful complaint of the Ars longa,--and
Vita brevis.--Life short, cried my father,--and the art of healing
tedious! And who are we to thank for both the one and the other, but
the ignorance of quacks themselves,--and the stage-loads of chymical
nostrums, and peripatetic lumber, with which, in all ages, they have
first flatter'd the world, and at last deceived it?

--O my lord Verulam! cried my father