a work on the Philosophical
Principles of Religion; an Essay of Health and Long Life; a work called
the English Malady; and another entitled the Natural Method of Cure in
the Diseases of the Body, and the Distempers of the Mind depending
thereon. The latter, and his Essay of Long Life are, in my view, his
greatest works; though the history of his own experience is chiefly
contained in his English Malady.

I shall now proceed to make such extracts from his works, as seem to me
most striking and important to the general reader. They are somewhat
numerous, and there may be a few repetitions; but I was more anxious to
preserve his exact language--which is rather prolix--than to abridge too
much, at the risk of misrepresenting his sentiments.

"When I see milk, oil, emulsion, mild watery fluids, and such like soft
liquors run through leathern tubes or pipes (for such animal veins and
arteries indeed are) for years, without destroying them, and observe on
the other hand that brine, inflammable or urinous spirits, and the like
acrimonious and burning fluids corrode, destroy, and consume them in a
very short time; when I consider the rending, burning, and tearing pains
and tortures of the gout, stone, colic, cancer, rheumatism, convulsions,
and such like insufferably painful distempers; when I see the crises of
almost all acute distempers happen either by rank and fetid sweats,
thick lateritious and lixivious sediments in the urine, black, putrid,
and fetid dejections, attended with livid and purple spots, corrosive
ulcers, impostumes in the joints or muscles, or a gangrene and
mortification in this or that part of the body; when I see the sharp,
the corroding and burning ichor of scorbutic and scrofulous sores,
fretting, galling, and blistering the adjacent parts, with the
inflammation, swelling, hardness, scabs, scurf, scales, and other
loathsome cutaneous foulnesses that attend, the white gritty and chalky
matter, and hard stony or flinty concretions which happen to all those
long troubled with severe gouts, gravel, jaundice, or colic--the
obstructions and hardnesses, the putrefaction and mortification that
happen in the bowels, joints, and members in some of these diseases, and
the rottenness in the bones, ligaments, and membranes that happen in
others; all the various train of pains, miseries, and torments that can
afflict any part of the compound, and for which there is scarce any
reprieve to be obtained, but by swallowi