The Art of Living in Australia: Together with Three Hundred Australian Cookery Recipes and Accessory Kitchen Information by Mrs. H. Wicken

* * (c) Clothing. * * (d) Diet. * * (e) Exercise. * This is a convenient method of remembering the five great fundamental principles concerned in the preservation of health. It will serve, moreover, as a means of impressing them upon the memory, superior to any other with which I am acquainted. This very number five, indeed, has a more than ordinary significance belonging to itself. It has been termed a mystical number. "Five," says Pythagoras, "has peculiar force in expiations. It is everything. It stops the power of poisons and is redoubted by evil spirits." According to the Pythagorean school of philosophy, the world is a piece of harmony and man the full chord. The major chord consists of a fundamental or tonic, its major third and its just fifth. The eighth note, or complement of the octave, is the diapason of man. These are of course very highly imaginative speculations. It is interesting to remember, however, that the system of astronomy first taught by Pythagoras was afterwards developed into the solar system by Copernicus, and is now received as the Copernican system. But, turning from grave to gay, we find that five wits have been described, viz., common sense, imagination, fantasy, estimation, and memory. Of these, common sense passes judgment on all things; imagination brings the mind to realise what comes before it; fantasy stimulates the mind to act; estimation has to do with all that pertains to time, space, locality, etc.; and memory is "the warder of the brain." Then again, have we not also the five senses of seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling, and tasting? Have we not likewise five fingers and five toes on either hand and foot? Moreover, is not fives an ancient and hollowed game, still popular wherever the English language is spoken, and is not its name derived from its being played with the "bunch of FIVES," namely the hand? And further, there must be numbers of Australians who know well what "five-corners" are. In addition to the foregoing, the number five has an important historical and legal association in connection with