rward with triumphant confidence
in behalf of some doctrine not yet extinct. No doubt some may have
honestly thought they proved something; may have used them with the
purpose of convincing their friends, or of silencing the opponents
of their favorite doctrine, whatever that might be. But any train
of arguments which was contrived for Perkinism, which was just as
applicable to it as to any other new doctrine in the same branch of
science, and which was fully employed against its adversaries forty
years since, might, in common charity, be suffered to slumber in the
grave of Perkinism. Whether or not the following sentences, taken
literally from the work of Mr. Perkins, were the originals of some of
the idle propositions we hear bandied about from time to time, let those
who listen judge.

The following is the test assumed for the new practice: "If diseases are
really removed, as those persons who have practised extensively with
the Tractors declare, it should seem there would be but little doubt
of their being generally adopted; but if the numerous reports of their
efficacy which have been published are forgeries, or are unfounded,
the practice ought to be crushed." To this I merely add, it has been
crushed.

The following sentence applies to that a priori judging and uncandid
class of individuals who buy their dinners without tasting all the
food there is in the market. "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. These were those who knew that Harvey's report of the
circulation of the blood was a preposterous and ridiculous suggestion,
and in latter later days there were others who knew that Franklin
deserved reproach for declaring that points were preferable to balls for
protecting buildings from lightning."

Again: "This unwarrantable mode of offering assertion for proof, so
unauthorized and even unprecedented except in the condemnation of
a Galileo, the persecution of a Copernicus, and a few other acts of
inquisitorial authority, in the times of ignorance and superstition,
affords but a lamentable instance of one of his remarks, that this is
far from being the Age of Reason."

"The most valuable medicines in the Materia Medica act on principles of
which we are totally ignorant. None have ever yet been able to explain
how opium produces sleep, or how bark cures