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EDITORIAL OBSERVATIONS. 
produced Barthez and Bordeu, and Bordeu produced Bichat. Still, even 
at the present day—but how enfeebled!—the two parties are face to 
face. Gradually they are disappearing, leaving in history the re¬ 
membrance of their long and ardent struggles—prolonged for three 
centuries and a half—from the end of the middle ages to the commence¬ 
ment of the French revolution. 
“ Two sects—either through indifference or through calculation, kept 
clear of the struggle—the empirics and the sceptics. At the head of the 
empirics was Sydenham. Their business was to watch attentively the 
origin and progress of phenomena, noting with scrupulous care the effects 
of remedies and the fruit of observation—leaving aside all useless specu¬ 
lations. 
“ Scepticism glided into medicine, thanks to the demi-savans. The 
title of sceptic belongs to those narrowed and pretentious soul;, who, 
contented with a superficial view, seize only the surface of things, 
losing sight of the links which unite them, and boldly denying the 
existence of whatever escapes them, affirming in this absolute negative 
their incapacity and deficiency. Lower still in the scale of systems we 
find the eclectics—physicians who, following certain metaphysicians, 
think to find a perfect system in taking what is good out of every system. 
Their appearance on the stage announces the end of systems. In the 
scientific as in the social order, end means transition, a new phasis, com¬ 
mencement of a new order. Medicine, which has undergone so many 
vicissitudes, is thus at present traversing a period of transition; it is in 
the way of organization, in a provisionary state.” 
From all this we are induced to ask the questions—Are 
the many diversities which now exist anything new ? Are 
they anything more than revivals of what once has been ? 
It has been thought that man’s doings, like storms, move 
in circles, and therefore a periodical recurrence of events 
takes place. Our present inventions and discoveries seem 
to have been before known, although perhaps, never so 
practically applied as now. A writer on this subject states 
that— 
“ The history of the dawning of great inventions shows us that nearly 
all our most important discoveries have been subject to repeated revivals 
and extinctions before they attained a character of permanence. Indeed, 
one author, M. Fournier, to whom we are indebted for much valuable 
information, asserts, in his recently published work, ‘ Le Vieux-neuf/ 
that no industrial or scientific discovery can escape that common law of 
alternate decadence and revival which clings to all human invention, and 
frequently interposes many centuries of neglect between its birth and its 
fully developed vitality. We need not wonder, then, to meet in remote 
antiquity with the use and practice of many things whose origin we 
commonly refer to modern times ; for, notwithstanding the presumed 
superiority of the present over previous ages, we may still exclaim, as 
Solomon did three thousand years ago. ‘ There is nothing new under the 
sun, for the thing that hath been is that which shall be, and that which is 
done that which shall be done.’ 
“ Thus, for instance, the Chinese, who seem to have hovered on the 
