e generally conceded, ought to be of
great weight in deciding the question.

M. Double, a well-known medical writer and a physician of high standing
in Paris, had occasion so long ago as 1801, before he had heard of
Homoeopathy, to make experiments upon Cinchona, or Peruvian bark. He and
several others took the drug in every kind of dose for four months, and
the fever it is pretended by Hahnemann to excite never was produced.

M. Bonnet, President of the Royal Society of Medicine of Bordeaux, had
occasion to observe many soldiers during the Peninsular War, who made
use of Cinchona as a preservative against different diseases, but he
never found it to produce the pretended paroxysms.

If any objection were made to evidence of this kind, I would refer to
the express experiments on many of the Homoeopathic substances, which
were given to healthy persons with every precaution as to diet and
regimen, by M. Louis Fleury, without being followed by the slightest of
the pretended consequences. And let me mention as a curious fact, that
the same quantity of arsenic given to one animal in the common form of
the unprepared powder, and to another after having been rubbed up into
six hundred globules, offered no particular difference of activity in
the two cases.

This is a strange contradiction to the doctrine of the development of
what they call dynamic power, by means of friction and subdivision.

In 1835 a public challenge was offered to the best known Homoeopathic
physician in Paris to select any ten substances asserted to produce the
most striking effects; to prepare them himself; to choose one by lot
without knowing which of them he had taken, and try it upon himself or
any intelligent and devoted Homoeopathist, and, waiting his own time,
to come forward and tell what substance had been employed. The challenge
was at first accepted, but the acceptance retracted before the time of
trial arrived.

From all this I think it fair to conclude that the catalogues of
symptoms attributed in Homoeopathic works to the influence of various
drugs upon healthy persons are not entitled to any confidence.

2. It is necessary to show, in the next place, that medicinal substances
are always capable of curing diseases most like their own symptoms.
For facts relating to this question we must look to two sources; the
recorded experience of the medical profession in general, and the
results of trials made according to Homoeopathic principles