strange as it may seem to modern pharmacopoeists, have accorded a _virtus
dormitiva_ to the new _facit dormire_. On this point they have been
misapprehended. They were prone to infer _facit_ from a _virtus_ imagined
_a priori_; and they were ready in supplying _facit_ in favor of an
orthodox _virtus_. They might have gone so far, for example, under
pre-notional impressions, as the alliterative allopath, who, when
maintenance of truth was busy opposing the progress of science called
_vaccination_, declared that some of its patients coughed like cows, and
bellowed like bulls; but they never refused to find _virtus_ when _facit_
came upon them, no matter whence. They would rather have accepted Tenterden
steeple than have rejected the Goodwin Sands. They would have laughed their
modern imitators to scorn: but as they are not here, we do it for them.

"The man of our day--the _a priori_ philosopher--tries the question whether
opium can cause sleep by finding out in the recesses of his own noddle
whether the drug can have a dormitive power: Well! but did not the
schoolman do the same? He did; but mark the distinction. The schoolman had
recourse to first principles, when there was no opium to try it by: our man
settles the point in the same way _with a lump of opium before him_. The
schoolman shifted his principles with his facts: the man of our
drawing-rooms will fight facts with his principles, just as an old {201}
physician would have done in actual practice, with the rod of his _Church_
at his back.

"The story about Galileo--which seems to have been either a joke made
against him, or by him--illustrates this. _Nature abhors a vacuum_ was the
explanation of the water rising in a pump: but they found that the water
would not rise more than 32 feet. They asked for explanation: what does the
satirist make the schoolmen say? That the stoppage is _not_ a fact, because
nature abhors a vacuum? No! but that the principle should be that nature
abhors a vacuum as far as 32 feet. And this is what would have been done.

"There are still among us both priests and physicians who would have
belonged, had they lived three or four centuries ago, to the glorious band
of whom I have spoken, the majority of the intelligent, working well for
mankind out of the professional pursuit. But we have a great many who have
helped to abase their classes. Go where we may, we find specimens of the
lower orders of the ministry of religion and the minist