382 HEALTH. 



homoeopathic to the effects of grief, that were the pathogenesy of 

 grief itself worked out by a law of order, the application of the 

 drugs allied to the state, would become infinitely more precise than 

 at present? What form the science will take under this develop- 

 ment, we cannot prophecy; but that it will hold more light and 

 more readiness, we very much foresee. 



Here we close our remarks on homoeopathy, as the basis of the 

 medical sciences. It is the intestine system of medicine in its finest 

 form, and cures as it were by touching the beginning of the body in 

 taste and the mouth. The law, however, is not confined to drugs, 

 but has an application we do not know how extensive. Some 

 glimpses of it will still be seen as we proceed to speak of other 

 organa of the healing art. 



We have said nothing on the vexed question of the doses, for very 

 little is known about it. The effect of a millionth differs so little 

 from that of a trillion th, that in the existing state of the science 

 we cannot make any available distinction. Fine points are the last 

 to be settled in any department. In a contagious disease, which 

 spreads from a single person to a town, we know almost nothing of 

 the differences that are caused by the transmission, or of any altered 

 manner in which the last occurring cases radiate their effects upon 

 susceptible people. Nor in infecting new portions of spirit with a 

 drug, have we the wit to see what the several dilutions* signify. It 

 is sufficient for this time, that acute and temporary disorders are 

 most amenable to the dilutions that are nearest to the matter of the 

 drug, while chronic maladies are chiefly touched by those high " po- 

 tencies" in which only the spirit seems to be present. 



Very different from homoeopathy, or the cure by specific drugs, 

 is Hydropathy, or the cure by water as a general element. The 

 former appears to contend with bodily diseases in their material 

 strongholds, searching them, and forcing them to quit their poison- 

 ous grasp of the organization. The latter, or hydropathy, is not 

 medicinal but hygienic, and operates by stimulating or depressing 

 the natural processes of the system. Fluid, either in the shape of 

 vapor or water, exists everywhere in the active organism; whatever 



* In preference to dilutions of drugs, we would rather term the higher po- 

 tencies, transmissions. 



