Sanctorius, which he had tried
in vain to find. I could have lent him the "Medicina Statica," with its
frontispiece showing Sanctorius with his dinner on the table before
him, in his balanced chair which sunk with him below the level of his
banquet-board when he had swallowed a certain number of ounces,--an
early foreshadowing of Pettenkofer's chamber and quantitative
physiology,--but the "Opera Omnia" of Sanctorius I had never met with,
and I fear he had to do without it.

I would extend the hospitality of these shelves to a class of works
which we are in the habit of considering as being outside of the pale
of medical science, properly so called, and sometimes of coupling with
a disrespectful name. Such has always been my own practice. I have
welcomed Culpeper and Salmon to my bookcase as willingly as Dioscorides
or Quincy, or Paris or Wood and Bache. I have found a place for St.
John Long, and read the story of his trial for manslaughter with as
much interest as the laurel-water case in which John Hunter figured as
a witness. I would give Samuel Hahnemann a place by the side of Samuel
Thomson. Am I not afraid that some student of imaginative turn and
not provided with the needful cerebral strainers without which all the
refuse of gimcrack intelligences gets into the mental drains and chokes
them up,--am I not afraid that some such student will get hold of
the "Organon" or the "Maladies Chroniques" and be won over by their
delusions, and so be lost to those that love him as a man of common
sense and a brother in their high calling? Not in the least. If he
showed any symptoms of infection I would for once have recourse to
the principle of similia similibus. To cure him of Hahnemann I would
prescribe my favorite homoeopathic antidote, Okie's Bonninghausen.
If that failed, I would order Grauvogl as a heroic remedy, and if he
survived that uncured, I would give him my blessing, if I thought
him honest, and bid him depart in peace. For me he is no longer an
individual. He belongs to a class of minds which we are bound to be
patient with if their Maker sees fit to indulge them with existence. We
must accept the conjuring ultra-ritualist, the dreamy second adventist,
the erratic spiritualist, the fantastic homoeopathist, as not unworthy
of philosophic study; not more unworthy of it than the squarers of the
circle and the inventors of perpetual motion, and the other whimsical
visionaries to whom De Morgan has devoted his mos