 the case; the road to Longevity was plain; nothing
more being required, says his lordship, but to repair the waste committed by the
internal spirit, by making the substance of it more thick and dense, by a
regular course of opiates on one side, and by refrigerating the heat of it on
the other, by three grains and a half of salt-petre every morning before you got
up. --
    Still this frame of ours was left exposed to the inimical assaults of the
air without; - but this was fenced off again by a course of greasy unctions,
which so fully saturated the pores of the skin, that no spicula could enter; --
nor could any one get out. -- This put a stop to all perspiration, sensible and
insensible, which being the cause of so many scurvy distempers - a course of
glisters was requisite to carry off redundant humours, - and render the system
compleat.
    What my father had to say to my lord of Verulam's opiates, his salt-petre,
and greasy unctions and glisters, you shall read, - but not to day - or to
morrow: time presses upon me, - my reader is impatient - I must get forwards. --
You shall read the chapter at your leisure, (if you chuse it) as soon as ever
the Tristrapædia is published. --
    Sufficeth it at present, to say, my father levelled the hypothesis with the
ground, and in doing that, the learned know, he built up and established his
own. --
 

                                  Chap. XXXVI.

The whole secret of health, said my father, beginning the sentence again,
depending evidently upon the due contention betwixt the radical heat and radical
moisture within us; - the least imaginable skill had been sufficient to have
maintained it, had not the school-men confounded the task, merely (as Van
Helmont, the famous chymist, has proved) by all along mistaking the radical
moisture for the tallow and fat of animal bodies.
    Now the radical moisture is not the tallow or fat of animals, but an oily
and balsamous substance; for the fat and tallow, as also the phlegm or watery
parts are cold; whereas the oily and balsamous parts are of a lively heat and
spirit, which accounts for the observation of Aristotle, »Quod omne animal post
coitum est triste.«
    Now it is certain, that the radical heat lives in the radical moisture, but
whether vice versâ, is a doubt: however, when the one decays, the other decays
also; and then is produced, either an unnatural heat
