19.  Physic, for the most part, is nothing else but the substitute of exercise or temperance.  Medicines are indeed absolutely necessary in acute distempers, that cannot wait the slow operations of these two great instruments of health:  but did men live in an habitual course of exercise and temperance, there would be but little occasion for them.  Accordingly we find that those parts of the world are the most healthy, where they subsist by the chase; and that men lived longest when their lives were employed in hunting, and when they had little food besides what they caught.

20.  Blistering, cupping, bleeding, are seldom of use to any but the idle and intemperate; as all those inward applications, which are so much in practice among us, are, for the most part, nothing else but expedients to make luxury consistent with health.  The apothecary is perpetually employed in countermining the cook and the vintner.  It is said of Diogenes, that meeting a young man who was going to a feast, he took him up in the street, and carried him home to his friends, as one who was running into imminent danger, had he not prevented him.

21.  What would that philosopher have said, had he been present at the gluttony of a modern meal?  Would not he have thought the master of the family mad, and have begged his servant to tie down his hands, had he seen him devour fowl, fish and flesh; swallow oil and vinegar, wines and spices; throw down sallads of twenty different herbs, sauces of an hundred ingredients, confections and fruits of numberless sweets and flavours?  What unnatural motions and counter-ferments must such a medley of intemperance produce in the body?  For my part, when I behold a fashionable table set out in all its magnificence, I fancy, that I see gouts and dropsies, fevers and lethargies, with other innumerable distempers, lying in ambuscade among the dishes.

22.  Nature delights in the most plain and simple diet.  Every animal but man keeps to one dish.  Herbs are the food of this species, fish of that, and flesh of a third.  Man falls upon every thing that comes in his way; not the smallest fruit or excrescence of the earth, scarce a berry, or a mushroom can escape him.

It is impossible to lay down any determinate rule for temperance, because what is luxury in one may be temperance in another; but there are few that have lived any time in the world, who are not judges of their own constitutions, so far as to know what kinds and what proportions of food do best agree with them.

23.  Were I to consider my readers as my patients, and to prescribe such a kind of temperance as is accommodated to all persons, and such as is particularly suitable to our climate and way of living, I would copy the following rules of a very eminent physician.  Make your whole repast out of one dish.  If you indulge in a second, avoid drinking any thing strong till you have finished your meal:  at the same time abstain from all sauces, or at least such as are not the most plain and simple.