Everything around exercises some influence upon us, either physically or morally. With this truth we are well acquainted. Influence may be exerted upon a being without touching, without moving that being.

In short, matter has been demonstrated to possess the astonishing power of gravitating without contact, of acting at immense distances. One idea influences another; a fact not less incomprehensible.

I have not with me at Mount Krapak the book entitled, “On the Influence of the Sun and Moon,” composed by the celebrated physician Mead; but I well know that those two bodies are the cause of the tides; and it is not in consequence of touching the waters of the ocean that they produce that flux and reflux: it is demonstrated that they produce them by the laws of gravitation.

But when we are in a fever, have the sun and moon any influence upon the accesses of it, in its days of crisis? Is your wife constitutionally disordered only during the first quarter of the moon? Will the trees, cut at the time of full moon, rot sooner than if cut down in its wane? Not that I know. But timber cut down while the sap is circulating in it, undergoes putrefaction sooner than other timber; and if by chance it is cut down at the full moon, men will certainly say it was the full moon that caused all the evil. Your wife may have been disordered during the moon’s growing; but your neighbor’s was so in its decline.

The fitful periods of the fever which you brought upon yourself by indulging too much in the pleasures of the table occur about the first quarter of the moon; your neighbor experiences his in its decline. Everything that can possibly influence animals and vegetables must of course necessarily exercise that influence while the moon is making her circuit.

Were a woman of Lyons to remark that the periodical affections of her constitution had occurred in three or four successive instances on the day of the arrival of the diligence from Paris, would her medical attendant, however devoted he might be to system, think himself authorized in concluding that the Paris diligence had some peculiar and marvellous influence on the lady’s constitution?

There was a time when the inhabitants of every seaport were persuaded, that no one would die while the tide was rising, and that death always waited for its ebb.

Many physicians possessed a store of strong reasons to explain this constant phenomenon. The sea when rising communicates to human bodies the force or strength by which itself is raised. It brings with it vivifying particles which reanimate all patients. It is salt, and salt preserves from the putrefaction attendant on death. But when the sea sinks and retires, everything sinks or retires with it; nature languishes; the patient is no longer vivified; he departs with the tide. The whole, it must be admitted, is most beautifully explained, but the presumed fact, unfortunately, is after all untrue.

The various elements, food, watching, sleep, and the passions, are constantly exerting on our frame their respective influences. While these influences are thus severally operating on us, the planets traverse their appropriate orbits, and the stars shine with their usual brillancy. But shall we really be so weak as to say that the progress and light of those heavenly bodies are the cause of our rheums and indigestion, and sleeplessness; of the ridiculous wrath we are in with some silly reasoner; or of the passion with which we are enamored of some interesting woman?

But the gravitation of the sun and moon has made the earth in some degree flat at the pole, and raises the sea twice between the tropics in four-and-twenty hours. It may, therefore, regulate our fits of fever, and govern our whole machine. Before, however, we assert this to be the case, we should wait until we can prove it.

The sun acts strongly upon us by its rays, which touch us, and enter through our pores. Here is unquestionably a very decided and a very benignant influence. We ought not, I conceive, in physics, to admit of any action taking place without contact, until we have............