ctrine the first is, that a man who has devoted himself to a
particular calling is to be considered necessarily ignorant thereof,
--and that certain babes and sucklings in that particular branch of
knowledge, and all others, are to be accepted as the true oracles
with regard to its mysteries. Doctrine the second is, that every new
theory accepted by any number of persons has some important truth at
the bottom of it.

The first of these doctrines has its real meaning. It is true that
there may be a common feeling of justice in the minds of ignorant
people which shall override the decisions of a learned Chief Justice.
It is true that a man may brutalize himself by a contemplation of
theological cruelties, until decent parents are ashamed to have
their children listen to his libels on the Father of All. It is true
that a physician may become such a drug-peddling routinist, that
sensible mothers see through him, and know enough to throw his trash
out of the window as soon as he turns his back.

The second doctrine has its real meaning. Until men turn into beasts,
they must have some arguments addressed to their reason before they
will believe, and still more before they will act. Spiritualism has
its significance, as an appeal from the gross materialism and
heathen ideas of another life so commonly entertained. Mormonism has
its logic, as an appeal from the enforced celibacy of one sex, and to
the Oriental Abrahamic instincts of the other. Homoeopathy has its
fraction of sanity, as a protest against that odious tendency of
physicians to give nauseous stuff to people because they are ailing,
which sickened the pages of old pharmacopoeias with powders of
earthworms and _album Graecum_, and even now makes illness terrible
where it reigns unrebuked.

Swallow these two paragraphs of concession as the infusion drawn
from those two doctrines laid down at starting, and throw away the
effete axioms as fit only for old women to coddle and drench
themselves withal. Having done this, the reader is ready for the
book the title of which we have prefixed.

DR. BIGELOW'S name is a guaranty that it shall contain many thoughts
in not over-many words. It is a pledge that we shall be emancipated
from all narrow technicalities and officinal idols, while following
his guidance. As a man of rare sagacity and wide range of knowledge,
a man of science before he became a leading practitioner in the
highest range of his profession, a philosopher