r
water gases too, which were each going to show us how to set the North
River on fire, but something or other has always broken down just at the
wrong moment. Nobody seems to reflect, when these water gases come up,
that if water could really be made to burn, the right conditions would
surely have happened at some one of the thousands of city fires, and
that the very stuff with which our stout firemen were extinguishing the
flames, would have itself caught and exterminated the whole brave wet
crowd!

Medicine is the means by which we poor feeble creatures try to keep from
dying or aching. In a world so full of pain it would seem as if people
could not be so foolish, or practitioners so knavish, as to sport with
men's and women's and children's lives by their professional humbugs.
Yet there are many grave M. D.'s who, if there is nobody to hear, and if
they speak their minds, will tell you plainly that the whole practice of
medicine is in one sense a humbug. One of its features is certainly a
humbug, though so innocent and even useful that it seems difficult to
think of any objection to it. This is the practice of giving a
_placebo_; that is, a bread pill or a dose of colored water, to keep the
patient's mind easy while imagination helps nature to perfect a cure. As
for the quacks, patent medicines and universal remedies, I need only
mention their names. Prince Hohenlohe, Valentine Greatrakes, John St.
John Long, Doctor Graham and his wonderful bed, Mesmer and his tub,
Perkins' metallic tractors--these are half a dozen. Modern history knows
of hundreds of such.

It would almost seem as if human delusions became more unreasoning and
abject in proportion as their subject is of greater importance. A
machine, a story, an animal skeleton, are not so very important. But the
humbugs which have prevailed about that wondrous machine, the human
body, its ailments and its cures, about the unspeakable mystery of human
life, and still more about the far greater and more awful mysteries of
the life beyond the grave, and the endless happiness and misery believed
to exist there, the humbugs about these have been infinitely more
absurd, more shocking, more unreasonable, more inhuman, more
destructive.

I can only allude to whole sciences (falsely so called) which are
unmingled humbugs from beginning to end. Such was Alchemy, such was
Magic, such was and still is Astrology, and above all, Fortune-telling.

But there is a more thorou