vy by scores, he sent to the physicians "two or three small vials
filled with a decoction of camomile, wormwood, and camphor, gave out
that it was a very rare and precious medicine--a medicine of such virtue
that two or three drops sufficed to impregnate a gallon of water,
and that it had been obtained from the East with great difficulty and
danger." This statement, made with much solemnity, deeply impressed the
soldiers; they took the medicine eagerly, and great numbers recovered
rapidly. Again, two centuries later, young Humphry Davy, being employed
to apply the bulb of the thermometer to the tongues of certain patients
at Bristol after they had inhaled various gases as remedies for
disease, and finding that the patients supposed this application of the
thermometer-bulb was the cure, finally wrought cures by this application
alone, without any use of the gases whatever. Innumerable cases of this
sort have thrown a flood of light upon such cures as those wrought by
Prince Hohenlohe, by the "metallic tractors," and by a multitude of
other agencies temporarily in vogue, but, above all, upon the miraculous
cures which in past ages have been so frequent and of which a few
survive.

The second department is that of hypnotism. Within the last half-century
many scattered indications have been collected and supplemented by
thoughtful, patient investigators of genius, and especially by Braid in
England and Charcot in France. Here, too, great inroads have been made
upon the province hitherto sacred to miracle, and in 1888 the cathedral
preacher, Steigenberger, of Augsburg, sounded an alarm. He declared his
fears "lest accredited Church miracles lose their hold upon the public,"
denounced hypnotism as a doctrine of demons, and ended with the singular
argument that, inasmuch as hypnotism is avowedly incapable of explaining
all the wonders of history, it is idle to consider it at all. But
investigations in hypnotism still go on, and may do much in the
twentieth century to carry the world yet further from the realm of the
miraculous.

In a third field science has won a striking series of victories.
Bacteriology, beginning in the researches of Leeuwenhoek in the
seventeenth century, continued by O. F. Muller in the eighteenth, and
developed or applied with wonderful skill by Ehrenberg, Cohn, Lister,
Pasteur, Koch, Billings, Bering, and their compeers in the nineteenth,
has explained the origin and proposed the prevention or cure of