Anxieties, evil habits, effeminate and unwholesome life;--all these betray themselves in the softened tissues, the meagre forms, the horrid scrofula. Lovely complexions cover the most vile diseases. Anne of Austria, renowned for her extreme clearness of complexion, died of loathsome ulcer; the Princess of Soubise, that dazzlingly fair beauty, rotted, so to speak, into her grave. In England, the Duke of Newcastle asked the learned Doctor Russell why it was that the beautiful Lily and Rose concealed so much of scrofula. It rarely happens that a worn out race recovers itself; but the English did so. For some seventy or eighty years it recovered a wonderful strength of activity. Partly it owed its recovery to its political and social disturbances,--for there is nothing so conducive to health as movement; but it must be confessed that the chief cause of its renovation was its change of habits. It changed in everything,--education, food, medicine; all were changed, for all felt that health and strength were necessary to success in anything and everything. There needed no great genius for such a Reform; the true theory had been propounded; all that was necessary was to make the Science an Art, to _practise_ what hitherto had only been _preached_. The Moravian, Comenius, writing a century before Rousseau, said: "Return to Nature; educate according to Nature;" the Saxon Hoffman said: "Return to Nature; make her your Physician." Hoffman appeared just in time to combat the evils caused by the orgies of the Regency, evils in which the remedies were as bad as the disease, the Physician as fatal as the Quack. Hoffman truly said to his age--"Leave Doctors alone; live temperately, drink water, and you will need no medicines." That was a true moral reform. And thus among ourselves, Priessnith in 1830, after the Bacchanalia of the Restoration imposed upon the luxurious aristocracy of Europe the coarse food of the peasant, and, in the hard northern climate, the open air bath, in snow water; that Hell of cold which, in its reaction, gives such a glow of heat. And the rich and the delicate submitted to this hard discipline; so great is our human love of life and fear of death. And, in fact, why should not water be the safety of man? Berzelius assures us that four-fifths of our living frames are water; just as four-fifths of our globe are covered by Oceans, Seas, Lakes, and Rivers. For our arid Earth the Sea is a constant Hydropathist, curing it of its otherwise deadly dryness, and nourishing and beautifying its fruits and flowers. Strange and prodigious magician, that same water! With so little, making so much; with so little, destroying so much--destroying so slowly, but so surely! _Gutta lapidem cavat, non vi, sed stepe cadendo_; "The plastic globule wears the rugged rock, By frequent falling, not by sudden shock."