736 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



create different symptoms or sufferings, it likewise requires doses of 

 equal quantity to create similar symptoms to those to which the sys- 

 tem 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 it- 

 self 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 

 3oo 00 to g fl 00 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 propor- 

 tion 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 



