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the sum" answered the needy person: "give me what you please, Sir, I shall be contented and thankful."-" Not so," replied the physiognomist, "as God lives I will give you what you want, be it little or much"-" Then, Sir, be pleased to give me eight shillings."-" Here they are; had you asked a hundred guineas you should have had them."

II.

CONCERNING TEMPERAMENTS.

THOSE who expect in this work an extensive and accurate essay on the temperaments, and their characteristics, will be mistaken. Much of what can be said, good and bad, has been, by Haller, Zimmermann, Kæmpf, Oberreit, and a multitude of others, ancient and modern, from Aristotle to Huart, from Huart to Behmen, and from Behmen to Lawatz. I have not studied these writers; that is to say, not sufficiently to understand them perfectly, or to compare each with himself, then each with the other, and, lastly, with general and individual nature. Yet thus much, I think, I may safely conclude, from all that I have read, that this subject, amply as it has been treated, requires new investigation. I have myself too little physiological knowledge, too little leisure and requisite sensation, for this physiological chemical enquiry, to afford me any hope that I am qualified for a laboured and well digested work of this kind.

Little as I am able to promise, I yet will venture a short essay, not without hope of

suggesting something which may hereafter be of service, to this very important branch of the knowledge of man.

It has been customary to characterize the four temperaments, and individually to apply the characteristics. Hence writers have run into an extreme highly disgraceful to human reason. They have denied the diversity of temperaments. I find in the writers on temperament the same disgraceful absurdity as in some famous French works on generation and organization; which are an indelible blemish, I will not say on the religion of their authors, but on the philosophy of the age and country.

We could as soon doubt concerning the varieties of the human countenance as we can that each human body, as well as all bodies in general, is and are composed, after a determinate manner, of various congruous and incongruous ingredients: that there is, if I dare use the metaphor, a particular receipt, or form of mixture, in the great dispensatory of God, for each individual, by which his quantity of life, his kind of sensation, his capacity, and activity, are determined; and that, consequently, each body

has its individual temperament, or peculiar degree of irritability. That the humid and the dry, the hot and the cold, are the four principal qualities of the corporeal ingredients is as undeniable as that earth and water, fire and air, are themselves the four principal ingredients. Hence there can be no doubt but that there will be four principal temperaments; the choleric, originating from the hot, the phlegmatic, from the moist, the sanguine, from air, and the melancholic, from earth. That is to say, that these are predominant in, or incorporated with, the blood, nerves, and juices, and indeed in the latter, in the most subtle, and almost spiritual, active, form. But it is equally indubitable to me that these four temperaments are so intermingled that innumerable others must arise, and that it is frequently difficult to discover which preponderates; especially since, from the combination and interchangeable attraction of those ingredients, a new power may originate, or be put in motion, the character of which may be entirely distinct from that of the two or three intermingling ingredients. This new power may be so distinct, so nameless, that we must be convinced that none of the customary appellations are proper. What is still more important, and less examined, is that nature herself has so

many elementary principles, or, if so you please to call them, ingredients for the forming of bodies, beside those of water, air, earth, and fire, and which I do not find to be held in due estimation by writers on the temperaments, although they are so active in nature.—Oil, for example, quicksilver, æther, the electric and magnetic fluids.

(The acidum pingue of Mayer, the frigorific matter of Schmidt, the fixed air of Black, and the nitrous air of the Abbe Fontana, it may be contested are the beings of hypothesis.) There may be hundreds of such elementary ingredients, to which we have given no names; but how many new classes of temperaments must originate only in three or four, and how infinite must be the varieties of their intermingling? Why should we not as well have an oily as a watery temperament; a mercurial as an earthy; or a temperament of æther as well as a temperament of air?

To how many various mixtures and forms may Stahl's inflammable essence, or element of viscosity, give birth! Such as the oily, resinous, gummy, glutinous, milky, gelatinous, butyrous or buttery, caseous or cheesy, saponaceous, ceraceous or waxy, camphoric,

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