stantly with cocaine! Of minor importance, perhaps, but not to be
despised, is the resulting liberation from the old slavery to bulky and
nauseous drugs. The isolation of active principles long antedated the
synthetical preparations, but the latter came at last--the marvellous
array of hypnotics, anodynes, and fever-quellers that are now at our
command, largely coal-tar products. But it is not to pure chemistry
alone that we are indebted for the elegant dosing of the present day;
progressive pharmacy, with its tablets, its coated pills, and its
capsules, has put to shame the old-time purveyor of galenicals. Right
jauntily do we now take our "soda mint" in case of slight derangement of
the stomach, happily oblivious of its vile prototype, the old rhubarb
and soda mixture. Even castor oil has been stripped of its repulsiveness
by the combinations which the soda water fountain affords.

It was but a step, we can now realize, from the employment of isolated
vegetable principles to that of preparations of certain glandular organs
of the animal economy, but the doctrine of "internal secretions" had to
intervene, and its evolution took time; not till toward the close of the
century did the venerable Brown-Sequard lead up to it. We have not yet
come to "eye of newt and toe of frog," but what we have incorporated
into modern therapeutics in the way of animal products lends at least
some theoretical justification to the ancient use of the dried organs of
various animals. It is but a few years since the "ductless glands"--such
organs, as, for example, the thyreoid gland (an organ situated in the
front of the neck, a small affair in its normal state, but prominent and
even pendulous when by its permanent enlargement it comes to constitute
a goitre)--were looked upon as puzzles, as structures destitute of any
known function. Some observers even affirmed that they had no function,
though the constancy of goitre in cretins ought to have shown the
fallacy of this allegation in the case of the thyreoid. We do not now
need to be told that the thyreoid gland plays a very important part in
the economy, for we know that its surgical removal gives rise to a
special disease known as myxoedema, which, in addition to its physical
manifestations, is characterized by impairment of the mental powers.
Consequently, this ductless gland--a gland, that is to say, which has no
obvious canal by which it throws off any product of its activity--must
elabor