iples
to which you will be able to refer isolated facts, and so bring these
within the range of recorded experience. See what the "London Times"
said about the three Germans who cracked open John Bull Chatwood's
strong-box at the Fair the other day, while the three Englishmen hammered
away in vain at Brother Jonathan Herring's. The Englishmen represented
brute force. The Germans had been trained to appreciate principle. The
Englishman "knows his business by rote and rule of thumb"--science, which
would "teach him to do in an hour what has hitherto occupied him two
hours," "is in a manner forbidden to him." To this cause the "Times"
attributes the falling off of English workmen in comparison with those of
the Continent.

Granting all this, we must not expect too much from "science" as
distinguished from common experience. There are ten thousand
experimenters without special apparatus for every one in the laboratory.
Accident is the great chemist and toxicologist. Battle is the great
vivisector. Hunger has instituted researches on food such as no Liebig,
no Academic Commission has ever recorded.

Medicine, sometimes impertinently, often ignorantly, often carelessly
called "allopathy," appropriates everything from every source that can be
of the slightest use to anybody who is ailing in any way, or like to be
ailing from any cause. It learned from a monk how to use antimony, from
a Jesuit how to cure agues, from a friar how to cut for stone, from a
soldier how to treat gout, from a sailor how to keep off scurvy, from a
postmaster how to sound the Eustachian tube, from a dairy-maid how to
prevent small-pox, and from an old market-woman how to catch the
itch-insect. It borrowed acupuncture and the moxa from the Japanese
heathen, and was taught the use of lobelia by the American savage. It
stands ready to-day to accept anything from any theorist, from any
empiric who can make out a good case for his discovery or his remedy.
"Science" is one of its benefactors, but only one, out of many. Ask the
wisest practising physician you know, what branches of science help him
habitually, and what amount of knowledge relating to each branch he
requires for his professional duties. He will tell you that scientific
training has a value independent of all the special knowledge acquired.
He will tell you that many facts are explained by studying them in the
wider range of related facts to which they belong. He will gratefully
recognize tha