we
any wiser than those great men? Two years ago, in a lecture before the
Massachusetts Historical Society, I mentioned this recipe of Sir Kenelm
Digby for fever and ague: Pare the patient's nails; put the parings in a
little bag, and hang the bag round the neck of a live eel, and place him
in a tub of water. The eel will die, and the patient will recover.

Referring to this prescription in the course of the same lecture, I said:
"You smiled when I related Sir Kenehn Digby's prescription, with the live
eel in it; but if each of you were to empty his or her pockets, would
there not roll out, from more than one of them, a horse-chestnut, carried
about as a cure for rheumatism?" Nobody saw fit to empty his or her
pockets, and my question brought no response. But two months ago I was in
a company of educated persons, college graduates every one of them, when
a gentleman, well known in our community, a man of superior ability and
strong common-sense, on the occasion of some talk arising about
rheumatism, took a couple of very shiny horse-chestnuts from his
breeches-pocket, and laid them on the table, telling us how, having
suffered from the complaint in question, he had, by the advice of a
friend, procured these two horse-chestnuts on a certain time a year or
more ago, and carried them about him ever since; from which very day he
had been entirely free from rheumatism.

This argument, from what looks like cause and effect, whether it be so or
not, is what you will have to meet wherever you go, and you need not
think you can answer it. In the natural course of things some thousands
of persons must be getting well or better of slight attacks of colds, of
rheumatic pains, every week, in this city alone. Hundreds of them do
something or other in the way of remedy, by medical or other advice, or
of their own motion, and the last thing they do gets the credit of the
recovery. Think what a crop of remedies this must furnish, if it were
all harvested!

Experience has taught, or will teach you, that most of the wonderful
stories patients and others tell of sudden and signal cures are like Owen
Glendower's story of the portents that announced his birth. The earth
shook at your nativity, did it? Very likely, and

"So it would have done,
At the same season, if your mother's cat
Had kittened, though yourself had ne'er been born."

You must listen more meekly than Hotspur did to the babbling Welshman,
for ignorance is