Directions for diet are minute and vexatious. The stranger is popularly condemned to ‘lodging-house hours’—breakfast at 9 A.M., dinner at 3 P.M., tea at 8 P.M., bed at 10 P.M. He is told also to live temperately but not abstemiously, and never to leave the stomach too long empty. I should prescribe for him, contrary to the usual plan, an abnormal amount of stimulants, port and porter, not claret nor Rhine-wine. It is evident that where appetite is wanting, and where nourishing food is not to be obtained, the ‘patient’ must imbibe as much nutriment as he safely can. In these lands a drunkard outlives a water-drinker, despite Theodoret, ‘vinum bibere non est malum, sed intemperanter bibere perniciosum est’; and here Bacchus, even ‘Bacchus uncivil,’ is still ‘Bacchus the healer.’ As usual old stagers will advise a stranger recovering from fever to strengthen himself with sundry bottles of port, and yet they do not adopt it as a preventive—‘experto crede Ricardo.’ The said port may be Lisbon wine fortified with cheap spirits, liquorice, and logwood—in fact, what is regimentally called ‘strong military ditto;’ yet I have seen wonders worked by the much-debased mixture. Again, Europeans are told to use purgatives, especially after sudden and strong exercise, when the ‘bile is stirred up.’ As an amateur chronothermalist—thanks to my kind old master, the late Dr Dickson—I should suggest tonics and bitters, which often bring relief when the nauseous salts and senna aggravate the evil. Also, in all debilitating countries, when the blood is ‘thin,’ laxatives must be mild, otherwise they cause instead of curing fever; in fact, double tonics and half purgatives should be the rule. Above all things convalescents should be aided by change of air, if only from the house of sickness to that of a neighbour, or to a ship in port. The most long-lived of white races are the citizens of the United States: they are superior to others in mental (or cerebral) energy; they are men of spare, compact fibre, and of regular habits; they also rarely reside more than two or three years at a time on the island. On the other hand, the small French colony has lost in 15 years 26 men: they lived imprudently, they drank sour Bordeaux, and when attacked with fever they killed themselves by the abuse of quinine. Swallowing large doses upon an empty stomach, they irritated the digestive organs, and they brought on cerebral congestion by ‘heroic practice’ when constipated.