ent record.

BOSTON, January, 1861.

A SECOND PREFACE.

These Lectures and Essays are arranged in the order corresponding to the
date of their delivery or publication. They must, of course, be read
with a constant reference to these dates, by such as care to read them.
I have not attempted to modernize their aspect or character in presenting
them, in this somewhat altered connection, to the public. Several of
them were contained in a former volume which received its name from the
Address called "Currents and Counter-Currents." Some of those contained
in the former volume have been replaced by others. The Essay called
"Mechanism of Vital Actions" has been transferred to a distinct
collection of Miscellaneous essays, forming a separate volume.

I had some intention of including with these papers an Essay on
Intermittent Fever in New England, which received one of the Boylston
prizes in 1837, and was published in the following year. But as this was
upon a subject of local interest, chiefly, and would have taken up a good
deal of room, I thought it best to leave it out, trusting that the stray
copies to be met with in musty book-shops would sufficiently supply the
not very extensive or urgent demand for a paper almost half a century
old.

Some of these papers created a little stir when they first fell from the
press into the pool of public consciousness. They will slide in very
quietly now in this new edition, and find out for themselves whether the
waters are those of Lethe, or whether they are to live for a time as not
wholly unvalued reminiscences.

March 21, 1883.

PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION.

These Essays are old enough now to go alone without staff or crutch in
the shape of Prefaces. A very few words may be a convenience to the
reader who takes up the book and wishes to know what he is likely to find
in it.

HOMOEOPATHY AND ITS KINDRED DELUSIONS.

Homoeopathy has proved lucrative, and so long as it continues to be so
will surely exist,--as surely as astrology, palmistry, and other methods
of getting a living out of the weakness and credulity of mankind and
womankind. Though it has no pretensions to be considered as belonging
among the sciences, it may be looked upon by a scientific man as a
curious object of study among the vagaries of the human mind. Its
influence for good or the contrary may be made a matter of calm
investigation. I have studied it in the Essay before the reader, und