Page:Quackery Unmasked.djvu/196

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192
QUACKERY UNMASKED.

quietly laid himself down and died, a victim to his own monomania.

Whenever the skin is excessively taxed, or by any means made to perform more than its proper share of labor in the vital organism, debility and decrepitude follow as the necessary sequence. If any one wishes to see this principle exemplified upon a larger scale, let him cast his eyes over the globe. The inhabitants of the Sandwich Islands, of Borneo, Sumatra, and Ceylon, who are in the water almost as much as alligators, and even those who bathe daily in the pure waters of the Ganges, are effeminate and shortlived. In these regions female beauty is almost as short-lived as that of the rose—it is on the decline at eighteen, and is gone at twenty-five. Forty years is old age. Now look at the inhabitants of Greenland, Iceland, and the northern portions of Russia. In these regions the entire surface of the body is seldom or never washed during the whole life, and yet these people are healthy, vigorous and long-lived. If physiology and the laws of hygiene were more thoroughly and more generally understood, people would be