Some of the old theoretical physicians went far beyond this. Sachs von Lewenheimb compared the microcosm of man with the macrocosm in which he exists. The heart in the one, he said, is what the ocean is in the other, the blood has its ebbing and flowing like the tide, and as the ocean receives its impulse from the moon and the winds, the brain and the vital spirits act in like manner upon the heart. Baillet has noticed for censure the title of his book in his chapter _Des prejugés des Titres des Livres_; it is _Oceanus Macro-Micro-cosmicus_. Peder Severinsen carrying into his medical studies a fanciful habit of mind which he might better have indulged in his younger days when he was a Professor of Poetry, found in the little world of the human body, antitypes of every thing in the great world, its mountains and its vallies, its rivers and its lakes, its minerals and its vegetables, its elements and its spheres. According to him the stars are living creatures, subject to the same diseases as ourselves. Ours indeed are derived from them by sympathy, or astral influence, and can be remedied only by those medicines, the application of which is denoted by their apparent qualities, or by the authentic signature of nature. This fancy concerning the origin of diseases is less intelligible than the mythology of those Rosicrucians who held that they were caused by evil demons rulers of the respective planets, or by the Spirits of the Firmament and the Air. A mythology this may more properly be called than a theory; and it would belong rather to the history of Manicheism than of medicine, were it not that in all ages fanaticism and imposture have, in greater or less degree, connected themselves with the art of healing. But however dignified, or super-celestial the theoretical causes of disease, its effect is always the same in bringing home, even to the proudest heart, a sense of mortal weakness: whereas the belief which places man in relation with the Stars, and links his petty concerns and fortunes of a day with the movements of the heavenly bodies, and the great chain of events, tends to exalt him in his own conceit. The thriftless man in middle or low life who says, in common phrase, that he was born under a threepenny planet, and therefore shall never be worth a groat, finds some satisfaction in imputing his unprosperity to the Stars, and casting upon them the blame which he ought to take upon himself. In vain did an old Almanack-maker say to such men of the Creator, in a better strain than was often attained by the professors of his craft.