Flatulence

“ Wind in the Stomach and Bowels.—This is a frequent reason why a pregnant lady cannot sleep at night. The two most frequent causes of flatulence are, first, the want of walking exercise during the day, and second, the eating of a hearty meal just before going to bed at night. ”

“ In our bodies food produces flatulence, the emission of which causes great offence to ones nasal susceptibilities; sometimes a report accompanies the relief of the stomach, sometimes there is more polite smothering of it. ”

“ While therefore the matter of flatulence proceeds from our aliments, the cause which makes air separate from them in such quantity as to occasion complaints, is almost always a fault of the bowels themselves, which are too weak either to prevent the production of elastic air, or to expel it after it is produced. ”

“ Those things which engender flatulence or tormina in the body, naturally do so in the hollow and broad parts of the body, such as the stomach and chest, where they produce rumbling noises; for when they do not fill the parts so as to be stationary, but have changes of place and movements, there must necessarily be noise and apparent movements from them. ”

“ Pinching in the abdomen, shifting from the left to the right side, with lame feeling in the thigh. A good deal of flatulence. Crampy flatulent colic, also at night. Incarcerated flatulence. Rumbling and fermentation in the abdomen. Excessive fetid flatulence. The distress from flatulence comes on again after eating ever so little. Hæmorrhoidal colic.
"Catarrhal Symptoms.—Stoppage of the nose, or discharge of water, without catarrh. Violent catarrh, with hoarseness and roughness of the chest, tingling in the nose, with ineffectual desire to sneeze. ”

“ Become flat. Flatter, v. a. 1. Compliment, gratify by praise. 2. Cajole, wheedle, humor, coax, court, STUFF, coddle, pay court to, fawn upon, curry favor with, try to win by adulation, make much of. 3. Encourage by plausible representations, inspire with false hopes. Flatterer, n. Sycophant, fawner, parasite, wheedler, toady, flunkey, spaniel, lick-spittle, pick-thank, toad-eater. Flattery, n. 1. Compliment, insincere commendation, false praise. 2. Obsequiousness, sycophancy, servility, cajolery, fawning, adulation, blarney, SOFT SAWDER, SOFT SOAP. Flatulence, n. ”

“ Prostrating myself mentally before my Guide, I cried, “How is it, O divine ideal of consummate loveliness and wisdom that I see thy inside, and yet cannot discern thy heart, thy lungs, thy arteries, thy liver?” “What you think you see, you see not,” he replied; “it is not given to you, nor to any other Being, to behold my internal parts. I am of a different order of Beings from those in Flatland. ”

“ It is part of the martyrdom which I endure for the cause of the Truth that there are seasons of mental weakness, when Cubes and Spheres flit away into the background of scarce-possible existences; when the Land of Three Dimensions seems almost as visionary as the Land of One or None; nay, when even this hard wall that bars me from my freedom, these very tablets on which I am writing, and all the substantial realities of Flatland itself, appear no better than the offspring of a diseased imagination, or the baseless fabric of a dream. ”

“ I see by my power of Sight Recognition——” “Oh, I have no patience with your Sight Recognition,” replied she, “‘Feeling is believing’ and ‘A Straight Line to the touch is worth a Circle to the sight’”—two Proverbs, very common with the Frailer Sex in Flatland.
“Well,” said I, for I was afraid of irritating her, “if it must be so, demand an introduction.” Assuming her most gracious manner, my Wife advanced towards the Stranger, “Permit me, Madam, to feel and be felt by——” then, suddenly recoiling, “Oh! it is not a Woman, and there are no angles either, not a trace of one. ”

“ Touched by my Wife's distress, I would have sprung downward to reassure her, but I found myself incapable of motion. "Trouble not yourself about your Wife," said my Guide; "she will not be long left in anxiety; meantime, let us take a survey of Flatland."
Once more I felt myself rising through space. It was even as the Sphere had said. The further we receded from the object we beheld, the larger became the field of vision. My native city, with the interior of every house and every creature therein, lay open to my view in miniature. ”

“ When it was objected that Priests and Women had no sides, they retorted that Nature and Expediency concurred in dictating that the front half of every human being (that is to say, the half containing his eye and mouth) should be distinguishable from his hinder half. They therefore brought before a general and extraordinary Assembly of all the States of Flatland a Bill proposing that in every Woman the half containing the eye and mouth should be coloured red, and the other half green. ”

“ When they consume too much grass they suffer from flatulency and colic, and require drastic treatment.
Rather than let some worthy men and women die, ought we not at times to adopt the ranchman’s treatment for flatus? This harsh means, however, might be avoided by inventive science. Overfed, con­sti­pated, inflated man, victim of habitual flatulency, could easily have small gas valves inserted here and there along his gastro-intestinal canal—one, say, to relieve the stomach of toxic gas, another for the appendix region, and still another in the hernial region of the abdomen. ”

“ Flattery is a dazzling meteor, which casts a delusive glare before the eye; and which seduces the imagination, perverts the judgment, and silences the dictates of sound reason. Flattery is, therefore, the poison and bane of the youthful mind. ”

“ The Flatterer is a lurking foe, a dangerous friend, a subtle destroyer. “A flattering mouth worketh ruin.” “He that speaketh flattery to his friends, even the eyes of his children shall fail.” “A man that flattereth his neighbour spreadeth a net for his feet.” The melancholy results of flattery are patent before the world, both on the page of history and in the experience of mankind. How many thousand young men who once stood in the uprightness of virtue are now debased and ruined through the flattery of the “strange woman,” so graphically described by Solomon in Prov. ”

“ But there is another great difference: the flatterers exaggerate as much as ever they can; the panegyrists in the midst of exaggeration observe the limitations of decency. And now that you have one or two of the many tests for flattery and panegyric proper, I hope you will not treat all praise as suspect, but make distinctions and assign each specimen to its true class. ”

“ But the size of our sides is not under consideration. I am speaking of the equality of sides, and it does not need much reflection to see that the whole of the social life in Flatland rests upon the fundamental fact that Nature wills all Figures to have their sides equal.
If our sides were unequal our angles might be unequal. Instead of its being sufficient to feel, or estimate by sight, a single angle in order to determine the form of an individual, it would be necessary to ascertain each angle by the experiment of Feeling. But life would be too short for such a tedious groping. ”

“ So too when Ptolemy seemed to desire to become learned, his flatterers used to spin out the time till midnight, disputing about some word or line or history, but not one of them all objected to his cruelty and outrages, his torturing and beating people to death.416 Just as if, when a man has tumours and fistulas, one were to cut his hair and nails with a surgeon's knife, so flatterers use outspokenness only in cases where it gives no pain or distress. ”

“ Can a flatterer be flattered? Does he instinctively recognize the commodity in which he deals? And if he does so recognize it, does he enjoy or dislike the application of it to his own case? These questions are suggested to my mind by the ungrudging tributes paid in my last chapter to Lord Beaconsfield's pre-eminence in the art of flattery. ”

“ But the example of Arisippus is chiefly followed, and flattery is that which makes men beloved. [Dante the poet said once to a flatterer, ‘Thou hast many more servants than I, for a poet cannot find how to feed and clothe himself, but a flatterer may rule and lead a king and all his land.’] There was a custom among the Romans, which was established against flattery, as follows. ”

“ But Flattery is Flattery still, and the Moral extends to All.
'Tis in it felt an Unmanly, Slavish Vice; but it is much Worse yet for the Alliance it has to Hypocrisie: for while we make other people think Better of themselves than they Deserve, we make them think Better of Us too than We Deserve: For Self-love and Vanity on the One hand, Assisls the Falseness and the Confidence on the Other, while it serves to confirm weak Minds in the Opinion they had of Themselves before ”

“ For as the mathematicians tell us that surfaces and lines neither bend nor extend nor move of themselves, being without body and only perceived by the mind, but only bend and extend and change their position with the bodies whose extremities they are: so you will catch the flatterer ever assenting with, and agreeing with, aye, and feeling with, and being angry with, another, so easy of detection in all these points of view is the difference between the friend and the flatterer. ”

“ You used the word flattery. To dislike those who practise it is only what you should do, and I honour you for it. But I would have you distinguish between panegyric proper and the flatterer's exaggeration of it. The flatterer praises for selfish ends, cares little for truth, and makes it his business to magnify indiscriminately; most of his effects consist in lying additions of his own; he thinks nothing of making Thersites handsomer than Achilles, or telling Nestor he is younger than any of the host ”

“ Though he had heard my voice when I first addressed him, the sounds had come to him in a manner so contrary to his experience that he had made no answer, “seeing no man,” as he expressed it, “and hearing a voice as it were from my own intestines.” Until the moment when I placed my mouth in his World, he had neither seen me, nor heard anything except confused sounds beating against, what I called his side, but what he called his inside or stomach; nor had he even now the least conception of the region from which I had come. Outside his World, or Line, all was a blank to him ”

“ Or perhaps the suggestion of flatness is to be ascribed to the enemy's failure on the whole to treat certain of his victims in any very extraordinary manner, and if so we can accept it and be thankful. ”

“ SIR, Flattery is a poisonous and pernicious weed, which grows and prevails every where, but most where it does most harm; I mean in courts. If few dare speak the truth to their superiors, how shall he who has no superiors ever come to know the truth? Perhaps there never was an instance in the world, where a prince was told the sincere truth in every thing which concerned him to know, by any servant of his. Truth is of a plain, unalterable nature, and cannot be moulded into fashionable shapes ”

“ He ceased; and there arose from the little buzzing creature a tiny, low, monotonous, but distinct tinkling, as from one of your Spaceland phonographs, from which I caught these words, "Infinite beatitude of existence! It is; and there is none else beside It."
"What," said I, "does the puny creature mean by 'it'?" "He means himself," said the Sphere: "have you not noticed before now, that babies and babyish people who cannot distinguish themselves from the world, speak of themselves in the Third Person? ”

“ Otherwise the angles might inflict on the unwary Feeling irreparable injury. It is essential for the safety of the Feeler that the Felt should stand perfectly still. A start, a fidgety shifting of the position, yes, even a violent sneeze, has been known before now to prove fatal to the incautious, and to nip in the bud many a promising friendship. Especially is this true among the lower classes of the Triangles. With them, the eye is situated so far from their vertex that they can scarcely take cognizance of what goes on at that extremity of their frame. ”

“ Flattery is carried to a shameless extent; and the habit of flattery almost inevitably introduces a false taste into composition. Its language is made up of hyperbolical common-places,—offensive from their triteness,—still more offensive from their extravagance. ”

“ Now some people, perverting the proper name, call this flattery ἀρέσκεια, complaisance; as Anaxandrides does in his Samian, where he says—
For flattery is now complaisance call'd.
But those who devote themselves to flattery are not aware that that art is one which flourishes only a short time. Accordingly, Alexis says in his Liar—
A flatterer's life but a brief space endures,
For no one likes a hoary parasite. ”

“ I am feeling like a man who had just come from under a deadly risk; am very weak and prostrated, with every nerve on the jump. Oh, so very weak! A sinking feeling. A parched thirstiness in my throat and mouth. My tongue is clean; bowels regular; a good deal of flatus, very fetid; pale yellow, greenish urine [Pg 157] (specific gravity 1008) , smelling very fetid; same smell as the flatus; more like the smell of rotting sweet fruit or vegetables. * * *
January 14, 1893. Could not get out of bed at my usual time; very severe pain in head and back of neck, going down my back and right leg ”