To-day's school was snooty touching on the major opinions of yesterday's crowd, and to-morrow's crowd already made faces at to-day's.
On just two points I found a unanimity of opinion among what might be termed the middle group of dietetic explorers as counter-distinguished from the pioneering cult and the modern or comparatively modern.

Each one was so absolutely certain that he was so absolutely right and so absolutely certain that all his contemporaries were so absolutely wrong.
At the beginning, it seemed, a reduction of the sufferer's flesh had been attempted by the simple device of bleeding him copiously--not with a monthly statement, as latterly, but with a lancet.

Abundant drinking of vinegar also had been recommended as a means to accomplish the desired end.

They were noble drinkers in the olden times, but until I began delving into literature of the subject I did not suspect that there had been any out-and-out vinegar topers.
There was citation in an early work of the interesting case of the Marquis of Cortona, a subchieftain under the Duke of Alva, and a fine fat old butcher he must have been, too, by all tellings.

Finding himself grown so rotund that no longer could he enter with zest into the massacre bees and torture outings which the Spaniards were carrying on in the harried Netherlands, the marquis had recourse to vinegar; and so efficacious was the treatment that, as the tradition runs, he soon could wrap his loosened skin about him in great slack folds like a cloak, and thus, close-reefed, go merrily murdering his way across the Low Countries.
One pictures the advantages accruing.