Animals and plants fall ill and die if their surface is so covered that neither air nor water can act upon them. If nourishment is withdrawn from any organic being, that is to say, if it is deprived of the opportunity of assimilating with external or foreign substances, death is caused by the want of a supply of healthy juices; if, on the contrary, this being is deprived of the influence or effect of this foreign power of dissolution, illness is the consequence, arising from the putridity of matter, from which putridity the system ought to have been released by the agency of foreign assimilation. XXX.--THE CRISIS. "Most blessed water! neither tongue can tell The blessedness thereof, nor heart can think, Save only those to whom it hath been given To taste of that divinest gift of heaven. "I stoop'd and drank of that divinest well, Fresh from the Rock of Ages where it ran, It had a heavenly quality to quell All pain: I rose a renovated man; And would not now, when that relief was known For worlds the needful suffering have forgone." To those unaccustomed to the Water-cure treatment, the Crisis is looked upon as something beyond human endurance; but by those who understand the nature of it, its arrival is hailed with joy, as the forerunner of a favourable termination to their sufferings. A Crisis has a two-fold object, the restoration of the animal functions to the condition of health, and the cure of a disease. It is not therefore a necessary consequence of the treatment; since, if there be no disease, the body is free from vitiated matter, and no eruption can appear; but if noxious matters exist in the system, whatever temporary relief be obtained by drugs or ointment, no permanent beneficial effect can be produced until they are extracted. Otherwise, original health, that is, the same muscular power and elasticity of body proportionately dealt out to all animals, will never be obtained during the life of an individual. Nature, to effect the elimination of non-nutritious matter, may resort to measures imperceptible to the patient, such as evaporation caused by ablutions, by relaxation of the bowels, or other evacuatory means. Although for twelve months, whilst at Gräfenberg, I went through all the necessary processes, I never had any perceptible crisis, except a slight water-rash, and the same may be said of many friends of mine, who have passed through the treatment.