ot a medicine to be taken internally, but that it
is very useful for disinfecting offensive apartments, and that its
tendency, when properly used, would be to counteract the cause of the
disease which they so much dreaded.

Among all nations, and in all ages of the world, ignorance has not only
debarred mankind from many exquisite and sublime enjoyments, but has
created innumerable unfounded alarms, which greatly increase the sum of
human misery. In the early ages of the world, a total eclipse of the sun
or of the moon was regarded with the utmost consternation, as if some
unusual catastrophe had been about to befall the universe. Believing
that the moon in an eclipse was sickening or dying, through the
influence of enchanters, the trembling spectators had recourse to the
ringing of bells, the sounding of trumpets, the beating of brazen
vessels, and to loud and horrid exclamations, in order to break the
enchantment, and to drown the muttering of witches, that the moon might
not hear them. Nor are such foolish opinions and customs yet banished
from the world.

Comets, too, with their blazing tails, were long regarded, and still are
by many, as harbingers of divine vengeance, presaging famines and
inundations, or the downfall of princes and the destruction of empires.
The northern lights have been frequently gazed at with similar
apprehensions, whole provinces having been thrown into consternation by
the fantastic coruscations of these lambent meteors. Some pretend to see
in these harmless lights armies mixing in fierce encounter and fields
streaming with blood, while others behold states overthrown,
earthquakes, inundations, pestilences, and the most dreadful calamities.
Because some one or other of these calamities formerly happened soon
after the appearance of a comet or the blaze of an aurora, therefore
they are considered either as the causes or the prognostics of such
events.

Popular ignorance has given rise to the practice of _judicial
astrology_; an art which, with all its foolish notions so fatal to the
peace of mankind, has been practiced in every period of time. Under a
belief that the characters and the fates of men are dependent on the
various aspects of the stars and conjunctions of the planets, the most
unfounded apprehensions, as well as the most delusive hopes, have been
excited by the professors of this fallacious science. Such impositions
on the credulity of mankind are founded on the grossest absur