ILLUSTRATIONS OF METHOD. 
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''specific," as applied to animal, vegetable, or diseased structures, 
or symptoms, has ceased to have its old meaning. The great periods 
and slow rates of evolution and change must be ever present to our 
minds. The lines or order of evolution " overlap ;" forms of being- 
evolve, arise, culminate, and disappear. This is traceable, not only 
in animal and vegetable forms, but also in languages, types of 
disease, institutions, &c. 
In making ideas the great method of knowledge, other ways are 
not disparaged ; yet there is great danger in this age, lest thought 
be choked by the growth of masses of incongruous facts. Science 
must incorporate the spirit of poetry. (Buckle.) 
The method of classification of instances (F. Bacon) was referred 
to, and the method of analogy. Analogy is our greatest hope and 
power. By analogy we recognize the ever, to us, expanding series 
of alliances in nature. The expectation of remedies in medical art 
is mainly from analogy. Having attained to a general truth on any 
aspect of nature, we almost d priori know truth on other sides by 
the method of analogy — e.g., the great periods of geology made 
easy to us those of the evolution of language. The correlation of 
the varied physical " affections" leads us to expect and to see that 
many diseased phenomena (fevers, cholera, &c.) must very much 
also be ''affections" in true partship with man's composition, 
latent generally, but showing naturally in certain states of relation. 
To apply the light of some modern generalizations to a view of 
cholera. Cholera is not an entity or distinct existence ; it is a devia- 
tion of the system's rates ; the normal rates necessarily prevail, but 
a cumulated capacity for change is reached. Then, certain depres- 
sions or changes happening, the series of fevers, including cholera, 
show. The body has throughout its life a nearness toward, or 
tendency to, the general type of deviation known as the class of 
fevers, more existent in earlier years than as age advances. The 
whole series of infantile, adult, tropical, and extra tropical fevers, 
are one great allied "form." 
In an early stage of development the mind saw "causes" of 
cholera in any associated external circumstance, such as air, water, 
soil, low level, electrical states, ozonic, heat, river courses, direc- 
tion of wind, paths of human transit, food, vegetables, fruits, gases, 
miasmas, poisons, germs, &c, &c. Howsoever important, all such 
are minor directions — are seeking " the greater in the lesser world." 
Cholera has a wider base ; the change into cholera is the result of 
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