and consequently the great men, whom I have just mention’d, owed their reputation more to their extraordinary genius, than to industry and application; and prevented the ill effects of their severer studies, by allowing themselves intervals of leisure, by taking proper exercise, and by the dissipation both of business and amusement. Nor did they lead the life of abstracted students, a species of men little known to the ancients, and who took their rise first at the declension of literature, were renew’d at its revival, and may be properly compar’d to the Indian fakirs; for both bid farewell to the human race, and both of their own accord, and generally without any emolument to society, emaciate and inflict austerities upon themselves; the former by the sun, by cold, by nails, by chains, by whips; the latter by books, manuscripts, coins, monuments, and almost all by inaction, and the want of bodily exercise. This is another, and a most prolific source of the disorders which afflict men addicted to study; for the human machine was form’d and intended for action by the supreme artificer: therefore health is inseparable from action, which will be easily conceiv’d by whoever examines the human body with attention. It consists of containing and moving vessels, contained and moved fluids: if the fibres or vessels have a proper tone, if the fluids have a proper consistence, if the motions, by which they should be continually agitated, are neither too violent, nor deficient, we enjoy a good state of health. But it should be taken into consideration, that motion is here the chief agent, for, that alone being chang’d, the whole state of the solids and fluids is chang’d likewise: if it be increased, the solids grow harder, and the fluids are compress’d; if it be diminished, the fibre becomes relaxed, the density of the blood is lessened, for the whole body is form’d of a chyle, which is softer and lighter than any part of the body, either solid or fluid, whose small particles a continual motion unites and strongly compresses; and if this motion should fail, the parts must prove deficient in their due firmness.