Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 23.djvu/756

736 create different symptoms or sufferings, it likewise requires doses of equal quantity to create similar symptoms to those to which the system is already so greatly predisposed.

The atomic dose will, however, bear a much closer and more severe test than has been applied to it. It is an approved and well-known fact that a person of iron will will battle long and successfully with a disease which baffles the aid of the most skillful physician, and it is said that his will sustains him. By that is not meant that he leans upon his will as upon a staff, nor that the immaterial, the will, comes in actual contact with the material, the disease; but that the will, acting through the brain, rouses up in the system material resistance to the disease, and effects a cure or prolongs the fight. How much brain would one have to eat in order to obtain a decillionth part of a grain of the will-power which operated in the system in effecting a cure or battling with the disease? The will operating through the brain moves one joint of the little finger, then two, then three, and so on until it moves by one operation of the will the whole fourteen joints of the five fingers, which act in unison at one motion. Yet it is clear that each additional joint moved resulted from the impression made upon a larger area of the nerve-centers in the brain. Assuming for the sake of argument that the correct method of cure is to arouse in the system a direct reaction against disease, and that this can only be accomplished through the brain, it follows that the remedy, which in form is best adapted to act upon the brain, is the best so far as mere form is concerned; and if the immaterial, the will, can produce such positive physical results, the quantity of the medicine operating upon the brain is not required by any law of physics (or physiology) to be many times greater than the nerve-cell, which is the body to be operated upon; especially must this be true when the object sought is not to overwhelm the nerve-center, but simply to stimulate it to increased action.

Professor Calderwood, in his "Relations of Mind and Brain," says of the nerve-cells in the brain: "These are so numerous as to baffle calculation. From the number seen within a small section under the microscope, it is reckoned that there must be many thousands of them in the human brain." Of the nerve-fibers he says: "In the brain itself they are sometimes as minute as a twelve-thousandth part of an inch," and that the smallest of the nerve-fibers in the eye are from to  part of an inch in diameter. As an adaptation of means to end, a decillionth part of a grain, broken up into many still more minute particles, does not appear to be so much out of proportion to the nerve-cell or to the ducts, the nerve-fibers, as the two, four, six, or more grains given by the allopaths.

The stench contained in a few drops distilled by a skunk attains a potential existence in the air for not less than five hundred feet in every direction. Taking one thousand feet cubed as a minimum, we