seas to put
themselves in charge of foreign celebrities, who dosed them as lustily as
they were ever dosed before they took to globules! It will surprise many
to learn to what a shadow of a shade Homoeopathy has dwindled in the
hands of many of its noted practitioners. The itch-doctrine is treated
with contempt. Infinitesimal doses are replaced by full ones whenever
the fancy-practitioner chooses. Good Homoeopathic reasons can be found
for employing anything that anybody wants to employ. Homoeopathy is now
merely a name, an unproved theory, and a box of pellets pretending to be
specifics, which, as all of us know, fail ignominiously in those cases
where we would thankfully sacrifice all our prejudices and give the world
to have them true to their promises.

Homoeopathy has not died out so rapidly as Tractoration. Perhaps it was
well that it should not, for it has taught us a lesson of the healing
faculty of Nature which was needed, and for which many of us have made
proper acknowledgments. But it probably does more harm than good to
medical science at the present time, by keeping up the delusion of
treating everything by specifics,--the old barbarous notion that sick
people should feed on poisons [Lachesis, arrow-poison, obtained from a
serpent (Pulte). Crotalus horridus, rattlesnake's venom (Neidhard). The
less dangerous Pediculus capitis is the favorite remedy of Dr. Mure, the
English "Apostle of Homoeopathy." These are examples of the retrograde
current setting towards barbarism] against which a part of the Discourse
at the beginning of this volume is directed.

The infinitesimal globules have not become a curiosity as yet, like
Perkins's Tractors. But time is a very elastic element in Geology and
Prophecy. If Daniel's seventy weeks mean four hundred and ninety years,
as the learned Prideaux and others have settled it that they do, the "not
many years" of my prediction may be stretched out a generation or two
beyond our time, if necessary, when the prophecy will no doubt prove
true.

It might be fitting to add a few words with regard to the Essay on the
Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever. But the whole question I consider to
be now transferred from the domain of medical inquiry to the
consideration of Life Insurance agencies and Grand Juries. For the
justification of this somewhat sharply accented language I must refer the
reader to the paper itself for details which I regret to have been forced
to place on perman