HOMOEOPATHY. 371 



where is the absurdity to end, without experiment, which may 

 choose to show that the millionth or decillionth of a grain will 

 have even better results ? I marvel how men who lift fourteen 

 stone by the equipoise of a skillful grain, can sneer at other men, 

 who do the same nice balance by incalculably lesser weights. For 

 it is evident that all medicine is on this railway of smallness, and 

 is more perfect and harmless for every fcesh terminus that it reaches. 

 If the allopathists were accustomed to give calomel porridges, their 

 wrath against small doses would be consistent ; but when they are 

 themselves reduced to grains, why should they cavil at other healers, 

 who, by experiment, have found out the value of grains of grains. 



It was Hahnemann to whom all the world is indebted for the 

 scientific deepening of medicine in both these fields. He, first of 

 men, saw that if poison in gcnere is given to disease in genere, 

 the aim will be more neatly hit if poison in particulari be admin- 

 istered to disease in particulari. This conception of his, involved 

 the working of a very peculiar " science of correspondences" be- 

 tween the effects of drugs and the symptoms of diseases, so as to 

 discover exactly what poisons, and what order of them, would an- 

 swer to the symptoms and flux of special maladies. In the ideal 

 of this great sportsman, each shot in the gun was cognizant of its 

 own part of the prey, and the line of sight was the science which 

 brought poison level with disease. May we not extend the meta- 

 phor, and say, that man in sickness is like two men, each wrestling 

 with the other ; and that the physician comes to shoot the worser 

 man to death, without a grain of the charge touching the better : 

 in this case the homoeopathic dose will not hit the struggling health, 

 because the shot can wound nothing but disease ; whereas the 

 allopathic bullet, having no scientific speciality in its projection, 

 generally riddles both the men, and leaves mere death, or its ante- 

 cedents on the field. 



The matter of doses depends upon the fineness of the aim. In 

 everything there is npunctum saliens so small, that if we could find 

 it out, a pin's point would cover it as with a sky. What is the 

 meaning of that invisible world which is especially versed about 

 organization, if there be not forces and substances whose minute- 

 ness excludes them from our vision ? We have not to batter the 



