498 THE MOUNTAIN. 



monsters of night and chaos ; " mumblements from the lake 

 of eternal sleep." This swarm of gad-flies, like the plagues 

 of Egypt, the curses of Pharaoh, are ceaseless in their efforts 

 to scare the college from its proprieties, and to alarm the 

 toga and tripod in their sanctity. 



In steep and sour antagonism to the ancient formulae of 

 medical philosophy, the fruit of that highly respectable old 

 tree rooted in the actual, with all nature to defend her, comes 

 this party of innovators, constituting the category of fashion- 

 able and impertinent quackeries of the hour. Some of these, 

 ignoring matter as matter with fixed and unalterable laws, 

 addressing the senses and intellect of man, try to make it 

 spirit with omnipotent power by dilution and trituration ; 

 others, profanely setting aside the time-honored division, 

 that venerable classification of all things into the four sensi- 

 ble old elements, namely, earth, air, fire, and water, aver 

 that man is a fish, and requires only one of them for his 

 medium of existence, and that he ought to live, move, and 

 have his being in water ; while others, dropping entirely the 

 sensible universe, appeal directly to the supernals, and, 

 through heaven-directed influxes and divinely-inspired me- 

 dia, summon the spirits from the "vasty deep" to reveal 

 the hidden secrets of disease, to dispatch the dirty chores of 

 the body, and abolish its nasty obstructions. 



Of these heterodox and belligerent schisms, (for schools, 

 their crude, heterogeneous, and inconceivable agglomeration 

 of dreams cannot be called,) some are quite hydra-headed 

 and formidable, armed with the true poison-fangs of the 

 serpent Error, and thus, being real agencies of death, and 

 clearly belonging to the deviVs department of strategies, 

 lies, and baleful enchantments, eternizing evil, legitimating 

 murder, and forming true vampirisms on earth. Others 

 wane away into the confines of inanition and stupidity, con- 

 stituting the lowest systems of vulgar and fraudulent deceits 

 and old-womanish delusions, until, in the limbo of absolute 

 fatuity, they terminate in the " sound and fury of the idiot's 

 story, signifying nothing," noise and smoke overclouding 



