the patrimony of cheats and the currency of dupes from
time immemorial,--Facts! Facts! Facts! First came the published cases
of the American clergymen, brigadier-generals, almshouse governors,
representatives, attorneys, and esquires. Then came the published cases
of the surgeons of Copenhagen. Then followed reports of about one
hundred and fifty cases published in England, "demonstrating the efficacy
of the metallic practice in a variety of complaints both upon the human
body and on horses, etc." But the progress of facts in Great Britain did
not stop here. Let those who rely upon the numbers of their
testimonials, as being alone sufficient to prove the soundness and
stability of a medical novelty, digest the following from the report of
the Perkinistic Committee. "The cases published [in Great Britain]
amounted, in March last, the date of Mr. Perkins's last publication, to
about five thousand. Supposing that not more than one cure in three
hundred which the Tractors have performed has been published, and the
proportion is probably much greater, it will be seen that the number, to
March last, will have exceeded one million five hundred thousand!"

Next in order after the appeal to what were called facts, came a series
of arguments, which have been so long bruised and battered round in the
cause of every doctrine or pretension, new, monstrous, or deliriously
impossible, that each of them is as odiously familiar to the scientific
scholar as the faces of so many old acquaintances, among the less
reputable classes, to the officers of police.

No doubt many of my hearers will recognize, in the following passages,
arguments they may have heard brought forward with triumphant confidence
in behalf of some doctrine not yet extinct. No doubt some may have
honestly thought they proved something; may have used them with the
purpose of convincing their friends, or of silencing the opponents of
their favorite doctrine, whatever that might be. But any train of
arguments which was contrived for Perkinism, which was just as applicable
to it as to any other new doctrine in the same branch of science, and
which was fully employed against its adversaries forty years since,
might, in common charity, be suffered to slumber in the grave of
Perkinism. Whether or not the following sentences, taken literally from
the work of Mr. Perkins, were the originals of some of the idle
propositions we hear bandied about from time to time, let those who