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THE

SPECTATOR.

No 195. SATURDAY, OCTOBER 13, 1711.

Νήπιοι, ἐδ ̓ ἴσασιν όσῳ πλέον ήμισυ παντός.
Οὐδ ̓ ὅσον ἐν μαλάχῃ τε δὲ ἀσφοδέλω μέγ ̓ ὁνειαρ.

HES. Oper. & Dier. 1. i. 40.

Fools not to know that half exceeds the whole,
How blest the sparing meal and temperate bowl.

THERE is a story in the Arabian Nights Tales of a
king who had long languished under an ill habit of
body, and had taken abundance of remedies to no
purpose. At length, says the fable, a physician
cured him by the following method: He took a
hollow ball of wood, and filled it with several drugs;
after which he closed it up so artificially that nothing
appeared. He likewise took a mall, and after hav-
ing hollowed the handle, and that part which strikes
the ball, he inclosed in them several drugs after the
He then ordered
same manner as in the ball itself.
the sultan, who was his patient, to exercise himself
early in the morning with these rightly prepared in-
struments, till such time as he should sweat: when,
as the story goes, the virtue of the medicaments per-
spiring through the wood had so good an influence
on the sultan's constitution, that they cured him of
VOL. IX.

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an indisposition which all the compositions he had taken inwardly had not been able to remove. This eastern allegory is finely contrived to shew us how beneficial bodily labour is to health, and that exercise is the most effectual physic. I have described in my hundred and fifteenth paper, from the general structure and mechanism of an human body, how absolutely necessary exercise is for its preservation. I shall in this place recommend another great preservative of health, which in many cases produces the same effects as exercise, and may, in some measure, supply its place, where opportunities of exercise are wanting. The preservative I am speaking of is temperance, which has those particular advantages above all other means of health, that it may be practised by all ranks and conditions, at any season, or in any place. It is a kind of regimen into which every man may put himself, without interruption to business, expence of money, or loss of time. If exercise throws off all superfluities, temperance prevents them; if exercise clears the vessels, temperance neither satiates nor overstrains them; if exercise raises proper ferments in the humours, and promotes the circulation of the blood, temperance gives nature her full play, and enables her to exert herself in all her force and vigour; if exercise dissipates a growing distemper, temperance starves it.

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. cordingly 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

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