^SCULAPIUS. 501 



literatures ; thou hast now at last gotten thy tail into the 

 mush-pots of science, and henceforward the bread of the 

 understanding must be eaten with the " cud of sweet and 

 bitter fancies," while the spectacles of demonstration must 

 be taken from the learned nose, and their place supplied 

 by thine infernal kaleidoscope ! With all deference and love 

 for the order of poetical minds, " misled by fancy's meteor 

 ray," whom this seductive system has warped from the nor- 

 mality and light of reason, and seduced by the rainbow-tints 

 of its "sailing foam-bells," or swallowed by the inarticulate 

 and hazy infinitude of its suggestiveness, an enlightened criti- 

 cism brings the fatal verdict : " thou hast been weighed in 

 the scales, and found wanting." Lacking the positive in 

 science, wandering in the wilderness of distractions belong- 

 ing to the metaphysical or transition period, or phases of 

 development of the human mind, and lacking every single 

 element of the fatal and absolute, constituting true science 

 with eternally fixed and definitive laws ; lacking the one 

 thing needful for the life of a theory, or system, thou lackest 

 all things, and hast failed. The Ajax of this hallucination, a 

 poet by the ordinance of Nature, and true son of the morn- 

 ing, winged and heaven-aspiring, but sadly cut loose from the 

 moorings of sound sense and the ballast of logical reason- 

 ing, has the following set of oracular utterances : " I sup- 

 pose it impossible to overrate the consequences of Hahne- 

 mann's life. Even the negative results are vast for our future 

 well-being. I think of medicines now as curative personali- 

 ties who take upon them to battle in us with our ills. He 

 made the true experiment of doing relatively nothing in 

 medicine, and found it abundantly successful and humane. 

 Purgatives were one nasty superstition which he banished. 

 Bleeding was another of these vampires," etc.* A man and 

 a system who make the awfully-daring and significant ex- 



* "Negatives tend to annihilation; affirmations are precious; 

 negative results might be affirmative consequences, and medicines, 

 as curative personalities, might have a good time battling in the 

 bowels of a man ; but ' ex nihil nihil fit.' " ROBERT SMITH. 



