them as the French Institute
is in the habit of displaying when memoirs or models are offered to it
relating to the squaring of the circle or perpetual motion; which it is
the rule to pass over without notice. They would feel as astronomers and
natural philosophers must have felt when, some half a dozen years ago,
an unknown man came forward, and asked for an opportunity to demonstrate
to Arago and his colleagues that the moon and planets were at a distance
of a little more than a hundred miles from the earth. And so they would
not even look into Homoeopathy, though all its advocates should exclaim
in the words of Mr. Benjamin Douglass Perkins, vender of the Metallic
Tractors, that "On all discoveries there are persons who, without
descending to any inquiry into the truth, pretend to know, as it were
by intuition, that newly asserted facts are founded in the grossest
errors." And they would lay their heads upon their pillows with a
perfectly clear conscience, although they were assured that they were
behaving in the same way that people of old did towards Harvey, Galileo,
and Copernicus, the identical great names which were invoked by Mr.
Benjamin Douglass Perkins.

But experience has shown that the character of these assertions is
not sufficient to deter many, from examining their claims to belief.
I therefore lean but very slightly on the extravagance and extreme
apparent singularity of their pretensions. I might have omitted them,
but on the whole it seemed more just to the claims of my argument
to suggest the vast complication of improbabilities involved in the
statements enumerated. Every one must of course judge for himself as to
the weight of these objections, which are by no means brought forward as
a proof of the extravagance of Homoeopathy, but simply as entitled to
a brief consideration before the facts of the case are submitted to our
scrutiny.

The three great asserted discoveries of Hahnemann are entirely
unconnected with and independent of each other. Were there any natural
relation between them it would seem probable enough that the discovery
of the first would have led to that of the others. But assuming it to be
a fact that diseases are cured by remedies capable of producing symptoms
like their own, no manifest relation exists between this fact and
the next assertion, namely, the power of the infinitesimal doses. And
allowing both these to be true, neither has the remotest affinity to
the third new