ry medicine has
become a popular remedy before being adopted or even tried by
physicians," and the famous author Dr. Pereira declares that "nux
vomica is one of the few remedies the discovery of which is not the
effect of mere chance."

The spirit of bigotry, in former times, jealously watched every
innovation. Telescopes and microscopes were denounced as atheistic,
winnowing machines were denounced in Scotland as impious, and even
forks when first introduced were denounced by preachers as "an insult
on Providence not to eat our meat with our fingers."

It is not strange that the last fifty years have sufficed to cover
with a cloud of collegiate ignorance and bigotry the discoveries of
the illustrious Gall, for whom I am doing a similar service, to that
of Copernicus for Pythagoras.

This is nothing unusual in the progress of Science. There was no
brighter genius in physical science at the beginning of this century
than Dr. Thomas Young, who died in 1829, whose discoveries fell into
obscurity until they were revived by more recent investigation. He had
that intuitive genius which is most rare among scientists.

He was a great thinker and discoverer, who knew how to utilize in
philosophy discovered facts, and was not busy like many modern
scientists in the monotonous repetition of experiments which had
already been performed.

"At no period of his life was he fond of repeating experiments
or even of originating new ones. He considered that however
necessary to the advancement of science, they demanded a great
sacrifice of time, and that when a fact was once established,
time was better employed in considering the purposes to which it
might be applied, or the principles which it might tend to
elucidate."

He says, in his Bakerian lecture, "Nor is it absolutely necessary in
this instance to produce a single new experiment; for of experiments
there is already an ample store."

In a letter to his sister-in-law, Mrs. Earle, he says, "Acute
suggestion was then, and indeed always, more in the line of my
ambition than experimental illustration," and on another occasion,
referring to the Wollaston fund for experimental inquiries, he said,
"For my part, it is my pride and pleasure, as far as I am able, to
supersede the necessity of experiments, and more especially of
expensive ones." The famous Prof. Helmholtz said of Young:

"The theory of colors with all their marvellous and complicated