large manufactory at Belleville received a severe blow upon the left side, several years ago. Latterly he has become very corpulent, subject to dizziness and headache; moreover the left leg is swollen, and he suffers pain in the side which had been bruised. Professor Cloquet first recommended bleedings, then leeches, afterwards frictions and plaisters. The patient at length, wearied with the aggravation rather than the amelioration of his ailings, came to consult me in the month of April, 1853. In the course of two months under my treatment he has lost his excessive corpulence, is free from pain in the side, his leg is no longer swollen; he is active, and has now no fear of being obliged to give up his business. This is another instance of disease due to obesity. After reading the preceding remarks, some astonishment must be felt that medical writers have paid so little attention to the subject of corpulence. It has been said not to constitute a disease: that it is a normal condition: that it is a condition intermediate between health and disease: that a fat person is predisposed to disease. For my part I cannot comprehend a condition between health and disease, with corpulence; and if such do exist it is attended with those infirmities and serious inconveniences already mentioned. Predisposition to disease and morbid tendency are, in the case of persons labouring under obesity, the precursors of serous or sanguineous apoplexy, obstructions, &c. In fine, obesity is not always a disease, because it does not always cause suffering; but it ought, nevertheless, not to be neglected, because life cannot be of long duration under such circumstances, and may terminate suddenly at any moment. In the midst of the various duties of a medical career, I flatter myself that I have not fallen into an error, too frequent with medical men, that of referring all diseases to one single cause. Suspicion may arise that I have fallen into such an error, because I speak here only of those diseases consequent upon excessive corpulence; but I pray the reader to remember that a vast number of diseases exist which are altogether independent and foreign to obesity. It was, however, necessary that I should point out those morbid phenomena which are due to an excessive development of fat in the system. CHAPTER IV. Physical beauty, like virtue, is a type to which all approximate in different degrees, and which, when not wholly departed from, admits the possessor among the number of the accepted in the eyes of the world; but if, in the case of outward figure as with inward morality, any human attribute should appear distorted or unseemly, it gives rise immediately to a feeling of displeasure and aversion. Occupied at present with the consideration of physical form only, it may be averred that one of the most frequent deformities of the human body consists in an excessive development of fat.