, I would refer to the
express experiments on many of the Homoeopathic substances, which were
given to healthy persons with every precaution as to diet and regimen, by
M. Louis Fleury, without being followed by the slightest of the pretended
consequences. And let me mention as a curious fact, that the same
quantity of arsenic given to one animal in the common form of the
unprepared powder, and to another after having been rubbed up into six
hundred globules, offered no particular difference of activity in the two
cases.

This is a strange contradiction to the doctrine of the development of
what they call dynamic power, by means of friction and subdivision.

In 1835 a public challenge was offered to the best known Homoeopathic
physician in Paris to select any ten substances asserted to produce the
most striking effects; to prepare them himself; to choose one by lot
without knowing which of them he had taken, and try it upon himself or
any intelligent and devoted Homoeopathist, and, waiting his own time, to
come forward and tell what substance had been employed. The challenge
was at first accepted, but the acceptance retracted before the time of
trial arrived.

From all this I think it fair to conclude that the catalogues of symptoms
attributed in Homoeopathic works to the influence of various drugs upon
healthy persons are not entitled to any confidence.

2. It is necessary to show, in the next place, that medicinal substances
are always capable of curing diseases most like their own symptoms. For
facts relating to this question we must look to two sources; the recorded
experience of the medical profession in general, and the results of
trials made according to Homoeopathic principles, and capable of testing
the truth of the doctrine.

No person, that I am aware of, has ever denied that in some cases there
exists a resemblance between the effects of a remedy and the symptoms of
diseases in which it is beneficial. This has been recognized, as
Hahnemann himself has shown, from the time of Hippocrates. But according
to the records of the medical profession, as they have been hitherto
interpreted, this is true of only a very small proportion of useful
remedies. Nor has it ever been considered as an established truth that
the efficacy of even these few remedies was in any definite ratio to
their power of producing symptoms more or less like those they cured.

Such was the state of opinion when Hahnemann came forward wit