Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 23.djvu/752

732 exhibits not so much "decline" as destitution. However, I am not inclined to deal severely with the distinguished professor, and accordingly content myself with flinging back the title-page into his teeth.



ANY of the most important discoveries of the psychologists were rejected by the physiologists, because they could not be proved by their law—and conversely with the psychologists. These contending forces have been brought into lasting alliance by Professor Calderwood. It is believed that as close a relation can be established between Nature's laws and those of homœopathy.

Vaccination, as the sole and sure preventive of small-pox, is one of the great, dominant, fixed facts of the old school. Here is the open and avowed application of the law of cure by similars, similia similibus curantur. If it be a law of cure in one case, by what logical process can it be demonstrated to fail in all others? Those most conversant with Nature's laws assert, and truly, that she makes no exceptions: the law of gravity; that water seeks its own level; that the pressure of water is equal in all directions; that sound ascends; that heat expands. It was this universality of the law of Nature which enabled the great naturalist, Cuvier, to construct a whole skeleton from two or three bones. So, with equal certainty, if necessary, could the skeleton of the homœopathic law be evolved from this single bone of its structure—vaccination. Starting from different stand-points, the old and new schools have progressed in the same direction, to diminished doses, both in size and repetition. This is concededly due in the old school to the influence of homœopathy, in the new it is the growth of its own experience.

Messrs. Bell and Laird, in their admirable monograph on diarrhœa, say: "There is indeed a somewhat prevalent opinion that the strength of the dose makes up for want of due care or knowledge in selection. This may be stated in mathematical terms, as follows: If the thirtieth potency of arsenic is equal to a complete knowledge of the drug, one fifth of a grain of arsenious acid is equal to complete ignorance of it. Stated in this, its true form, we grant it."

Homœopathy, as a science, is the law of the vital force; the body is but the mechanism upon which it operates. The dissecting-knife has laid bare to the astonished gaze of the student a perfect organism, while the operating-table presents the companion picture of an 