let us suppose we take
one single drop of the Tincture of Camomile, and that the whole of this
were to be carried through the common series of dilutions.

A calculation nearly like the following was made by Dr. Panvini, and may
be readily followed in its essential particulars by any one who chooses.

For the first dilution it would take 100 drops of alcohol.

For the second dilution it would take 10;000 drops, or about a pint.

For the third dilution it would take 100 pints.

For the fourth dilution it would take 10,000 pints, or more than 1,000
gallons, and so on to the ninth dilution, which would take ten billion
gallons, which he computed would fill the basin of Lake Agnano, a body of
water two miles in circumference. The twelfth dilution would of course
fill a million such lakes. By the time the seventeenth degree of
dilution should be reached, the alcohol required would equal in quantity
the waters of ten thousand Adriatic seas. Trifling errors must be
expected, but they are as likely to be on one side as the other, and any
little matter like Lake Superior or the Caspian would be but a drop in
the bucket.

Swallowers of globules, one of your little pellets, moistened in the
mingled waves of one million lakes of alcohol, each two miles in
circumference, with which had been blended that one drop of Tincture of
Camomile, would be of precisely the strength recommended for that
medicine in your favorite Jahr's Manual, "against the most sudden,
frightful, and fatal diseases!" [In the French edition of 1834, the
proper doses of the medicines are mentioned, and Camomile is marked IV.
Why are the doses omitted in Hull's Translation, except in three
instances out of the whole two hundred remedies, notwithstanding the
promise in the preface that "some remarks upon the doses used may be
found at the head of each medicine"? Possibly because it makes no
difference whether they are employed in one Homoeopathic dose or another;
but then it is very singular that such precise directions were formerly
given in the same work, and that Hahnemann's "experience" should have led
him to draw the nice distinctions we have seen in a former part of this
Lecture (p. 44).]

And proceeding on the common data, I have just made a calculation which
shows that this single drop of Tincture of Camomile, given in the
quantity ordered by Jahr's Manual, would have supplied every individual
of the whole human family, past and present, with more th