no other reason, motive, or expectation than an earnest desire to help those who happened to be afflicted as I was, for that corpulence was remediable I was well convinced. The object I had in view impelled me to enter into minute particulars as well as general obser­vations, and to revert to bygone years, in order to show that I had spared no pains nor expense to accomplish the great end of stopping and curing obesity.

Few men have led a more active life—bodily or mentally—from a constitutional anxiety for regularity, precision, and order, during fifty years’ business career, from which I had retired, so that my corpulence and subsequent obesity were not through neglect of neces­sary bodily activity, nor from excessive eating, drink­ing, or self indulgence of any kind, except that I par­took of the simple aliments of bread, milk, butter, beer, sugar, and potatoes more freely than my age required, and hence, as I believe, the generation of the parasite, detrimental to comfort if not really to health.

I could not presume to descant on the bodily struc­tural tissues, nor how they are supported and renovated, having no mind or power to enter into those questions, which properly belong to the wise heads of the faculty. None of my family on the side of either parent had any tendency to corpulence, and from my earliest years I had an inexpressible dread of such a calamity, so, when I was between thirty and forty years of age, finding a tendency to it creeping upon me, I consulted an eminent surgeon, now long deceased,—a kind personal

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