344 
REVIEWS. 
Passing at once to the 
Classification of Medicaments, 
— we are informed in limine that materia medica, the same 
as all sciences whose object is the study of a vast number of 
bodies or of different phenomena, renders it necessary for 
us to assemble together in particular classes all such objects 
as appear to have most analogy or affinity between them ; 
though such methodical distribution, to be practically useful 
in the knowledge of medicaments, requires to be based upon 
such properties as science finds the most prominent. Still 
among the different properties of the subjects of pharma- 
cology, there exists no doubt that such as relate to the action 
exerted on the animal economy are the most interesting 
either to the veterinarian or the surgeon ; it being an error to 
hand such arrangement over for classification either to natu- 
ralists or to chemists, since neither the internal nor the ex- 
ternal character of bodies, nor their chemical, can serve to 
forewarn us of, much less explain to us, their modus operandi 
on the animal economy. 
Chained to physiology, therapeutics, and pathology, materia 
medica has ever partaken of their destinies, and with their 
incertitudes has ever been ranged under the different systems 
to which they have in succession been subservient. 
In our days, most authors engaged in the science of 
medicine have sought to avoid the rock I have just been 
warning you of, but among them none have been found who 
have succeeded in so simplifying their system as to render it 
capable of presenting any of the advantages one w r ould have 
desired from it. Since they admit but of two kinds of morbid 
phenomena, they acknowledge no more than two sorts of 
medicaments as adjutants — excitants on the one part, and 
debilitants on the other. 
It is true, we cannot deny that the largest number of 
medicaments have for their immediate effect the action of 
exciting or debilitating the tissues with which they come in 
relation directly or indirectly, and this is what we have 
sought to express by the distinction We have pronounced 
relative to the negative influence of some, and the positive 
