cry on a slight touch reveals the weak
spot in a profession, as well as in a patient. It is a doubtful policy
to oppose the freest speech in those of our own number who are trying to
show us where they honestly believe our weakness lies. Vast as are the
advances of our Science and Art, may it not possibly prove on examination
that we retain other old barbarisms beside the use of the astrological
sign of Jupiter, with which we endeavor to insure good luck to our
prescriptions? Is it the act of a friend or a foe to try to point them
out to our brethren when asked to address them, and is the speaker to
subdue the constitutional habit of his style to a given standard, under
penalty of giving offence to a grave assembly?

"Homoeopathy and its Kindred Delusions" was published nearly twenty years
ago, and has been long out of print, so that the author tried in vain to
procure a copy until the kindness of a friend supplied him with the only
one he has had for years. A foolish story reached his ears that he was
attempting to buy up stray copies for the sake of suppressing it. This
edition was in the press at that very time.

Many of the arguments contained in the Lectures have lost whatever
novelty they may have possessed. All its predictions have been submitted
to the formidable test of time. They appear to have stood it, so far,
about as well as most uninspired prophecies; indeed, some of them require
much less accommodation than certain grave commentators employ in their
readings of the ancient Prophets.

If some statistics recently published are correct, Homoeopathy has made
very slow progress in Europe.

In all England, as it appears, there are hardly a fifth more Homoeopathic
practitioners than there are students attending Lectures at the
Massachusetts Medical College at the present time. In America it has
undoubtedly proved more popular and lucrative, yet how loose a hold it
has on the public confidence is shown by the fact that, when a specially
valued life, which has been played with by one of its agents, is
seriously threatened, the first thing we expect to hear is that a regular
practitioner is by the patient's bed, and the Homoeopathic counsellor
overruled or discarded. Again, how many of the ardent and capricious
persons who embraced Homoeopathy have run the whole round of pretentious
novelties;--have been boarded at water-cure establishments, closeted with
uterine and other specialists, and finally wandered over