t he "Had better try Homoeopathy," are apt to enforce
their suggestion by adding, that "at any rate it can do no harm." This
may or may not be true as regards the individual. But it always does
very great harm to the community to encourage ignorance, error, or
deception in a profession which deals with the life and health of our
fellow-creatures. Whether or not those who countenance Homoeopathy are
guilty of this injustice towards others, the second of these Lectures
may afford them some means of determining.

To deny that good effects may happen from the observance of diet and
regimen when prescribed by Homoeopathists as well as by others, would be
very unfair to them. But to suppose that men with minds so constituted
as to accept such statements and embrace such doctrines as make up
the so-called science of Homoeopathy are more competent than others to
regulate the circumstances which influence the human body in health and
disease, would be judging very harshly the average capacity of ordinary
practitioners.

To deny that some patients may have been actually benefited through
the influence exerted upon their imaginations, would be to refuse
to Homoeopathy what all are willing to concede to every one of those
numerous modes of practice known to all intelligent persons by an
opprobrious title.

So long as the body is affected through the mind, no audacious device,
even of the most manifestly dishonest character, can fail of producing
occasional good to those who yield it an implicit or even a partial
faith. The argument founded on this occasional good would be as
applicable in justifying the counterfeiter and giving circulation to
his base coin, on the ground that a spurious dollar had often relieved a
poor man's necessities.

Homoeopathy has come before our public at a period when the growing
spirit of eclecticism has prepared many ingenious and honest minds to
listen to all new doctrines with a candor liable to degenerate into
weakness. It is not impossible that the pretended evolution of great and
mysterious virtues from infinitely attenuated atoms may have enticed a
few over-refining philosophers, who have slid into a vague belief
that matter subdivided grows less material, and approaches nearer to
a spiritual nature as it requires a more powerful microscope for its
detection.

However this may be, some persons seem disposed to take the ground of
Menzel that the Laity must pass formal judgment between the Phys