ted notions of the past against the progress of improvement,
have read the history of medicine to little purpose. The prevalent
failing of this profession has been, on the contrary, to lend a too
credulous ear to ambitious and plausible innovators. If at the present
time ten years of public notoriety have passed over any doctrine
professing to be of importance in medical science, and if it has not
succeeded in raising up a powerful body of able, learned, and ingenious
advocates for its claims, the fault must be in the doctrine and not in
the medical profession.

Homoeopathy has had a still more extended period of trial than this, and
we have seen with what results. It only remains to throw out a few
conjectures as to the particular manner in which it is to break up and
disappear.

1. The confidence of the few believers in this delusion will never
survive the loss of friends who may die of any acute disease, under a
treatment such as that prescribed by Homoeopathy. It is doubtful how far
cases of this kind will be trusted to its tender mercies, but wherever it
acquires any considerable foothold, such cases must come, and with them
the ruin of those who practise it, should any highly valued life be thus
sacrificed.

2. After its novelty has worn out, the ardent and capricious individuals
who constitute the most prominent class of its patrons will return to
visible doses, were it only for the sake of a change.

3. The Semi-Homoeopathic practitioner will gradually withdraw from the
rotten half of his business and try to make the public forget his
connection with it.

4. The ultra Homoeopathist will either recant and try to rejoin the
medical profession; or he will embrace some newer and if possible equally
extravagant doctrine; or he will stick to his colors and go down with his
sinking doctrine. Very few will pursue the course last mentioned.

A single fact may serve to point out in what direction there will
probably be a movement of the dissolving atoms of Homoeopathy. On the
13th page of the too frequently cited Manifesto of the "Examiner" I read
the following stately paragraph:

"Bigelius, M. D., physician to the Emperor of Russia, whose elevated
reputation is well known in Europe, has been an acknowledged advocate of
Hahnemann's doctrines for several years. He abandoned Allopathia for
Homoeopathia." The date of this statement is January, 1840. I find on
looking at the booksellers' catalogues that one Bigel, or