6VL HEALTH. 



human body to pieces in order to destroy it, but an artistic prick — 

 a bare bodkin — under the fifth rib, lets out the life entire. Nay, 

 had we neater skill of deadliness, a word would do it. The sum of 

 force brought to bear depends upon precision, and a single shot true 

 to its aim, or at most a succession of a few shots, would terminate 

 any battle that ever was fought, by picking off the chiefs. If our 

 gunnery be unscientific, the two armies must pound each other, 

 until chance produces the effects of science, by hitting the leaders ; 

 and in this case a prodigious expenditure of ammunition may be 

 requisite ; but when the balls are charmed, a handful will finish a 

 war. It is not fair to count weight of metal when science is on 

 the one side, and brute stuff on the other ; or to suppose that there 

 is any parallel of well- skilled smallness with ignorance of the most 

 portentous size. The allopathic school is therefore wrong in sup- 

 posing that our " littles" are the fractions of their " mickles ;" the 

 exactness of aim, in giving the former a new direction, takes them 

 out of all comparison with the unwieldy stones which the orthodox 

 throw from their catapults. 



But again, there is another consideration. Fact shows that the 

 attenuation of medicines may go on to such a point, and yet their 

 curative properties be preserved, nay, heightened, that we are 

 obliged to desert the hypothesis of their material action, and to 

 presume that they take rank as dynamical things. A drop of 

 aconite may be put into a glass of spirit, a drop of this latter into 

 another glass of spirit, and so on, to the hundredth or the thou- 

 sandth time, and still the aconite-property shall be available for cure. 

 Here then we enter another field, and deal with the spirits of things, 

 which are their potential forms, gradually refining massy drugs, 

 until they are likened to those sightless agents which we know to 

 be the roots of nature, and feel as the most powerful in ourselves. 

 How can such delicate monitors be looked at from the old point of 

 view, or assimilated to the violence that is exercised by material- 

 istic physic ? If the latter would stir the man, it does it by as 

 much main force as it dares to use; whereas the former moves him 

 by a word, through the affinities and likings of his organization. * 



* There is something unfair in the manner in which the public criticises cases 

 that do not recover under homoeopathic treatment. None oi our systems will 



