explorers as counter-distinguished
from the pioneering cult and the modern or comparatively modern. Each one
was so absolutely certain that he was so absolutely right and so
absolutely certain that all his contemporaries were so absolutely wrong.

At the beginning, it seemed, a reduction of the sufferer's flesh had been
attempted by the simple device of bleeding him copiously--not with a
monthly statement, as latterly, but with a lancet. Abundant drinking of
vinegar also had been recommended as a means to accomplish the desired
end. They were noble drinkers in the olden times, but until I began
delving into literature of the subject I did not suspect that there had
been any out-and-out vinegar topers.

There was citation in an early work of the interesting case of the Marquis
of Cortona, a subchieftain under the Duke of Alva, and a fine fat old
butcher he must have been, too, by all tellings. Finding himself grown so
rotund that no longer could he enter with zest into the massacre bees and
torture outings which the Spaniards were carrying on in the harried
Netherlands, the marquis had recourse to vinegar; and so efficacious was
the treatment that, as the tradition runs, he soon could wrap his loosened
skin about him in great slack folds like a cloak, and thus, close-reefed,
go merrily murdering his way across the Low Countries.

One pictures the advantages accruing. In cold weather, now, he might
overlap his wrinkles in a clapboarded effect and save the expense of
laying in heavy underwear. True, this might give to the wearer a
clinker-built appearance; still it would keep him nice and warm, and no
doubt he had his armor on outside the rest of his things. But likewise
there must have been drawbacks. Suppose, now, the marquis were caught out
in blowy weather and the wind worked in under his tucks and the ratlines
pulled loose and, all full-rigged and helpless, bellying and billowing and
flapping and jibing, he went scudding against his will before the gale.
Could he hope to tack and go about before he blew clear over into the next
county? I doubt it.

And suppose he inflated himself for a party or a reception or something,
and a practical joker put a tack in a chair and he sat down on it and had
a blow-out. The thought is not a pretty one, yet the thing were possible.

From these crude beginnings I worked my way down toward the present day.
Doctor Banting, of England, the father of latter-day dietetics from whose
nam