ertain bounds, like a
ship moving and tossing in a circle about its anchor. Now there can be
no disease without some cause, it being against the laws of Nature that
anything should be without a cause. Now it will be very hard to find a
new cause, unless we fancy some strange air, water, or food never tasted
by the ancients, should out of other worlds or intermundane spaces
descend to us. For we contract diseases from those very things which
preserve our life; since there are no peculiar seeds of diseases, but
the disagreement of their juices to our bodies, or our excess in using
them, disturbs Nature. These disturbances have still the very same
differences, though now and then called by new names. For names depend
on custom, but the passions on Nature; and these being constant and
those variable, this error has arisen. As, in the parts of a speech
and the syntax of the words, some new sort of barbarism or solecism can
suddenly arise; so the temperature of the body hath certain deviations
and corruptions into which it may fall, those things which are against
and hurtful to Nature being in some sort existent in Nature herself. The
mythographers are in this particular very ingenious, for they say that
monstrous uncouth animals were produced in the time of the Giants war,
the moon being out of its course, and not rising where it used to do.
And those who think Nature produces new diseases like monsters, and
yet give neither likely nor unlikely reasons of the change, err, as I
imagine, my dear Philo, in taking a less or a greater degree of the same
disease to be a different disease. The intension or increase of a thing
makes it more or greater, but does not make the subject of another kind.
Thus the elephantiasis, being an intense scabbiness, is not a new
kind; nor is the water-dread distinguished from other melancholic and
stomachical affections but only by the degree. And I wonder we did not
observe that Homer was acquainted with this disease, for it is evident
that he calls a dog rabid from the very same rage with which when men
are possessed they are said to be mad.

Against this discourse of Diogenianus Philo himself made some
objections, and desired me to be the old physicians' patron; who must
be branded with inadvertency and ignorance, unless it appears that those
diseases began since their time. First then Diogenianus, methinks, very
precariously desires us to think that the intenseness or remissness of
degrees is n