ncompatible diseases which are necessary to make
up a totally morbid state; and he will certainly die, if he does not take
freely of our prepared calomel, to be obtained only of one of our
authorized agents.

IV. No man shall be allowed to take our prepared calomel who does not
give in his solemn adhesion to each and all of the above-named and the
following propositions (from ten to a hundred) and show his mouth to
certain of our apothecaries, who have not studied dentistry, to examine
whether all his teeth have been extracted and a new set inserted
according to our regulations.

Of course, the doctors have a right to say we sha'n't have any rhubarb,
if we don't sign their articles, and that, if, after signing them, we
express doubts (in public), about any of them, they will cut us off from
our jalap and squills,--but then to ask a fellow not to discuss the
propositions before he signs them is what I should call boiling it down a
little too strong!

If we understand them, why can't we discuss them? If we can't understand
them, because we have n't taken a medical degree, what the Father of Lies
do they ask us to sign them for?

Just so with the graver profession. Every now and then some of its
members seem to lose common sense and common humanity. The laymen have
to keep setting the divines right constantly. Science, for instance,--in
other words, knowledge,--is not the enemy of religion; for, if so, then
religion would mean ignorance: But it is often the antagonist of
school-divinity.

Everybody knows the story of early astronomy and the school-divines. Come
down a little later, Archbishop Usher, a very learned Protestant prelate,
tells us that the world was created on Sunday, the twenty-third of
October, four thousand and four years before the birth of Christ.
Deluge, December 7th, two thousand three hundred and forty-eight years B.
C. Yes, and the earth stands on an elephant, and the elephant on a
tortoise. One statement is as near the truth as the other.

Again, there is nothing so brutalizing to some natures as moral surgery.
I have often wondered that Hogarth did not add one more picture to his
four stages of Cruelty. Those wretched fools, reverend divines and
others, who were strangling men and women for imaginary crimes a little
more than a century ago among us, were set right by a layman, and very
angry it made them to have him meddle.

The good people of Northampton had a very remarkable man for