fellow,
to inspire someone who has neither ear nor taste with a taste for music
and poetry, you will no more succeed than if you undertook to give sight
to a man born blind. We perfect, we soften, we conceal what nature has
put in us, but we do not put in ourselves anything at all.

One says to a farmer: "You have too many fish in this pond, they will
not prosper; there are too many cattle in your meadows, grass lacks,
they will grow thin." It happens after this exhortation that the pikes
eat half my man's carp, and the wolves the half of his sheep; the rest
grow fat. Will he congratulate himself on his economy? This countryman,
it is you; one of your passions has devoured the others, and you think
you have triumphed over yourself. Do not nearly all of us resemble that
old general of ninety who, having met some young officers who were
debauching themselves with some girls, says to them angrily: "Gentlemen,
is that the example I give you?"

_CHARLATAN_

The article entitled "Charlatan" in the "Encyclopedic Dictionary" is
filled with useful truths agreeably presented. The Chevalier de Jaucourt
has there presented the charlatanry of medicine.

We will take the liberty of adding here a few reflections. The abode of
the doctors is in the large towns; there are barely any doctors in the
country. It is in the great towns that the rich invalids are;
debauchery, the excesses of the table, the passions, are the cause of
their maladies. Dumoulin, not the lawyer, the doctor, who was as good a
practician as the other, said as he was dying, that he left two great
doctors behind him, diet and river water.

In 1728, in the time of Law, the most famous charlatan of the first
species, another, Villars by name, confided to some friends that his
uncle who had lived nearly a hundred years, and who died only by
accident, had left him the secret of a water which could easily prolong
life to a hundred and fifty years, provided a man was temperate. When he
saw a funeral pass, he shrugged his shoulders in pity; if the defunct,
he observed, had drunk my water, he would not be where he is. His
friends to whom he gave generously of the water, and who observed the
prescribed regime in some degree, thrived on it and praised it. He then
sold the bottle for six francs; the sale was prodigious. It was water
from the Seine with a little nitre. Those who took it and who subjected
themselves to a certain amount of regime, above all those who w