1 66 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



this statement, made with much solemnity, deeply impressed the 

 soldiers ; they took the medicine eagerly, and great numbers 

 recovered rapidly. Again, two centuries later, young Humphry 

 Davy, being employed to apply the bulb of the thermometer to 

 the tongues of certain patients at Bristol, after they had inhaled 

 various gases as a cure for disease, and finding that the patients 

 supposed this application of the thermometer-bulb was the cure, 

 finally wrought cures by this application alone, without any use 

 of the gases whatever. Innumerable cases of this sort have 

 thrown a flood of light upon such cures as those wrought by 

 Prince Hohenlohe, by the " metallic tractors," and by a multitude 

 of other agencies temporarily in vogue, but, above all, upon the 

 miraculous cures which in past ages have been so frequent and of 

 which a few survive. 



The second department is that of Hypnotism. Within the last 

 half -century many scattered indications have been collected and 

 supplemented by thoughtful, patient investigators of genius, and 

 especially by Braid in England and Charcot in France. Here too 

 great inroads have been made upon the province hitherto sacred 

 to miracle, and in 1888 the cathedral preacher, Steigenberger of 

 Augsburg, sounded an alarm. He declared his fears "lest ac- 

 credited church miracles lose their hold upon the public," de- 

 nounced hypnotism as a doctrine of demons, and ended with the 

 singular argument that, " inasmuch as hypnotism is avowedly 

 incapable of explaining all the wonders of history, it is idle to 

 consider it at all." But investigations in hypnotism, still go on, 

 and are to do much in the twentieth century to carry the world 

 yet farther from the realm of the miraculous. 



Finally, in a third field science has won a striking series of 

 victories. Bacteriology, beginning in the researches of Leeuwen- 

 hoek in the seventeenth century, continued by O. F. Muller in the 

 eighteenth, and developed or applied with wonderful power by 

 Ehrenberg, Cohn, Pasteur, Koch, Lister, Billings, and their com- 

 peers in the nineteenth, has explained the origin, and proposed 

 prevention or cure, for various diseases widely prevailing, which 

 until recently have been generally held to be " inscrutable provi- 

 dences." 



In summing up the history of this long struggle between 

 Science and Theology two main facts are to be noted : First, that 

 in proportion as the world approached the " Ages of Faith " it re- 

 ceded from ascertained truth, and in proportion as the world has 

 receded from the " Ages of Faith " it has approached ascertained 

 truth ; secondly, that in proportion as the grasp of theology upon 

 education tightened medicine declined, and in proportion as that 

 grasp has relaxed medicine has been developed. 



The world is hardly beyond the beginning of medical discov- 



