further notions of its efficacy must be
attributed merely to the vulgar love of paradox. If this example affords
any comfort to the Homoeopathist, it seems as cruel to deprive him of it
as it would be to convince the mistress of the smoke-jack or the flatiron
that the fire does not literally "draw the fire out," which is her
hypothesis.

But if it were true that frost-bites were cured by cold and burns by
heat, it would be subversive, so far as it went, of the great principle
of Homoeopathy.

For you will remember that this principle is that Like cures Like, and
not that Same cures Same; that there is resemblance and not identity
between the symptoms of the disease and those produced by the drug which
cures it, and none have been readier to insist upon this distinction than
the Homoeopathists themselves. For if Same cures Same, then every poison
must be its own antidote,--which is neither a part of their theory nor
their so-called experience. They have been asked often enough, why it
was that arsenic could not cure the mischief which arsenic had caused,
and why the infectious cause of small-pox did not remedy the disease it
had produced, and then the; were ready enough to see the distinction I
have pointed out. O no! it was not the hair of the same dog, but only of
one very much like him!

A third instance in proof of the Homoeopathic law is sought for in the
acknowledged efficacy of vaccination. And how does the law apply to
this? It is granted by the advocates of Homoeopathy that there is a
resemblance between the effects of the vaccine virus on a person in
health and the symptoms of small-pox. Therefore, according to the rule,
the vaccine virus will cure the small-pox, which, as everybody knows, is
entirely untrue. But it prevents small-pox, say the Homoeopathists.
Yes, and so does small-pox prevent itself from ever happening again, and
we know just as much of the principle involved in the one case as in the
other. For this is only one of a series of facts which we are wholly
unable to explain. Small-pox, measles, scarlet-fever, hooping-cough,
protect those who have them once from future attacks; but nettle-rash and
catarrh and lung fever, each of which is just as Homoeopathic to itself
as any one of the others, have no such preservative power. We are
obliged to accept the fact, unexplained, and we can do no more for
vaccination than for the rest.

I come now to the most directly practical point connected with th