Pastes and poultices for the face owe most of their efficacy to the moisture, which dissolves the old coarse skin, and the protection they afford from the air, which allows the new skin to form tender and delicate. Oat meal paste is efficacious as any thing, though less agreeable than the pastes made with white of egg, alum, and rose-water. The alum astringes the flesh, making it firm, while the egg keeps it sufficiently soft, and the rose-water perfumes the mixture. What are called indiscriminately moth, mask, morphew, and, by physicians, hepatic spots, are the sign of deep-seated disease of the liver. Taraxacum, the extract of dandelion root, is the standing remedy for this, and the usual prescription is a large pill four nights in a week, sometimes for months. To this may be added the free use of tomatoes, figs, mustard-seed, and all seedy fruits and vegetables, with light broiled meats, and no bread but that of coarse flour. Pastry, puddings of most sorts, and fried food of all kinds must be dispensed with by persons having a tendency to this disease. It may take six weeks, or even months, to make any visible impression on either the health or the moth patches, but success will come at last. One third of a teaspoonful of chlorate of soda in a wine-glass of water, taken in three doses, before meals, will aid the recovery by neutralizing morbid matters in the stomach. There is no sure cosmetic that will reach the moth patches. Such treatment as described, such exercise as is tempting in itself, and gay society, will restore one to conditions of health in which the extinction of these blotches is certain. CHAPTER XVII. The Banting System.--A Quaint Author.--Trials of Corpulency.--Result of Living on Sixpence a Day.--Indifference of Doctors.--A Wise Surgeon.--Relation of Glucose to Obesity.--Diet for Stout People.--No Starch, no Sugar.--Losing Flesh at the Rate of a Pound a Week.--“Human Beans.”--Humors of Banting’s Tract.--His Gratitude.--Honors to Dr. Harvey.--One Day with Dives, the Next with Lazarus.--Bromide of Ammonia. Request is often made for the details of Mr. Banting’s system of reducing flesh. The popular idea of the writer, whose modest pamphlet has linked his name with the system he observed, is very like the caricature of the dry modern savant. The severe scientist who keeps his child for years without fire or clothes to demonstrate the superiority of human beings to cold, or who throws a new-born baby into a tub of water to prove that the race can swim by nature, should not be mentioned on the same page with the kindly enthusiast of the letter on corpulency.