[93] “Novum fœtum a seminis masculi stimulo vitam concepisse.”—Elementa Physiologiæ, vol. viii. p. 177.
[94] Niebuhr, in his Travels, says the children in Arabia are taught to keep themselves constantly in motion by a kind of vibratory exercise of their bodies. This motion counteracts the diminution of life produced by the heat of the climate of Arabia.
[95] The stimulus of a disease sometimes supplies the place of food in prolonging life. Mr. C. S——, a gentleman well known in Virginia, who was afflicted with a palsy, which had resisted the skill of several physicians, determined to destroy himself, by abstaining from food and drinks. He lived sixty days without eating any thing, and the greatest part of that time without tasting even a drop of water. His disease probably protracted his life thus long beyond the usual time in which death is induced by fasting. See a particular account of this case, in the first number of the second volume of Dr. Coxe's Medical Museum.
[96] Exodus xxxiii, 11. xxxiv, 28.
[98] Niebuhr's Travels.
[99] Haller's Elements Physiologiæ, vol. viii. p. 2. p. 107.
[100] Dr. Mead relates, upon the authority of Dr. Hales, that more of the successful speculators in the South-Sea scheme of 1720 became insane, than of those who had been ruined by it.
[101] They have been very happily called by Mr. Green, in his poem entitled Spleen, “the manna of the day.”
[102] Dr. Barton.