all that ages of the most varied experience had
been taught to believe, should spring full formed from the brain of a
single individual.

Let us look a moment at the first of his doctrines. Improbable though it
may seem to some, there is no essential absurdity involved in the
proposition that diseases yield to remedies capable of producing like
symptoms. There are, on the other hand, some analogies which lend a
degree of plausibility to the statement. There are well-ascertained
facts, known from the earliest periods of medicine, showing that, under
certain circumstances, the very medicine which, from its known effects,
one would expect to aggravate the disease, may contribute to its relief.
I may be permitted to allude, in the most general way, to the case in
which the spontaneous efforts of an overtasked stomach are quieted by the
agency of a drug which that organ refuses to entertain upon any terms.
But that every cure ever performed by medicine should have been founded
upon this principle, although without the knowledge of a physician; that
the Homoeopathic axiom is, as Hahnemann asserts, "the sole law of nature
in therapeutics," a law of which nothing more than a transient glimpse
ever presented itself to the innumerable host of medical observers, is a
dogma of such sweeping extent, and pregnant novelty, that it demands a
corresponding breadth and depth of unquestionable facts to cover its vast
pretensions.

So much ridicule has been thrown upon the pretended powers of the minute
doses that I shall only touch upon this point for the purpose of
conveying, by illustrations, some shadow of ideas far transcending the
powers of the imagination to realize. It must be remembered that these
comparisons are not matters susceptible of dispute, being founded on
simple arithmetical computations, level to the capacity of any
intelligent schoolboy. A person who once wrote a very small pamphlet
made some show of objecting to calculations of thus kind, on the ground
that the highest dilutions could easily be made with a few ounces of
alcohol. But he should have remembered that at every successive dilution
he lays aside or throws away ninety-nine hundredths of the fluid on which
he is operating, and that, although he begins with a drop, he only
prepares a millionth, billionth, trillionth, and similar fractions of it,
all of which, added together, would constitute but a vastly minute
portion of the drop with which he began. But now