centuries. I would therefore suggest as the easiest plan to exchange our language gradually for greek, and that some attempt be made to destroy our tongue with classical correctness. For instance in the present case I would propose blood-poisoner or something of that sort, on the model of one of Homer's stupendous

names.

Whether this tough theory of blood-poisons first sprang up among those who practised the art of medicine, or was adopted from the traditions of the vulgar, who rate a homely simile or the dictum of some pragmatical old nurse or herbalist much on a par with the doctrines of a Harvey or Hunter, is a problem which in all probability will for ever remain unknown. It is not a marvel that such a simple expression, such an easy symbol should have been adopted by the unlettered; the marvellous part of the matter is the utter absence of proof in medical writings; in the building up of a theory of disease on a purely ideal basis, on a term not even yet defined; as though medicine were for ever to enjoy a perpetual immunity from such troublesome processes as induction and analysis.

Any one who is sceptical as to this being really the way in which medical questions are only too often dealt with, has only to read the history of cholera in 1849, or that of our most recent visitors diphtheria and typhus. If he object to do either, as he most probably will, let him go through some of the letters on smoking published in the various journals, and he will soon see how friend and foe alike ignore the necessity for proving or disproving the chimera of a poison in the blood, a state of matters which might make Lord

Bacon or Mr. Locke shake in their coffins, and which simply means what I have just said, that modern pathology rests upon a basis never yet proved, and depends for its existence upon a term never yet defined. "We talk," says Dr. Adams, "of the extirpation, extermination, and eradication of a poison, till at last we reason upon it as if there were really roots which we were to destroy (!) and at least a certain quantity of some substance which we have the power of discharging from the system"!

We smile complacently at the vagaries of the old writers, crotchets so absurd and useless that we have barely preserved the traditions of them. We feel quite satisfied that we should never have committed the preposterous folly of writing huge tomes which nobody read to prove that disease and remedy alternately triumphed or succumbed, as naturals or nonnaturals, as heat, cold, wet, or dryness predominated; we are graciously pleased to wonder at the literary tournaments held to decide whether a given disease should be ascribed to a conjunction of Mars and Saturn, to a lentor of the blood from too much seething or working of the animal spirits as raspberry jam is spoiled from over-cooking, or to the workings of phlogiston, the incarnate spirit of inflammation, a sort of bottle-imp only that it did a thousand times more mischief. We are amused to find the self-same disorder ascribed, in one age to an acid, in another to an alkali, in a third to worms, in a fourth to a ferment, and in a fifth to a difference in weight and velocity between the blood, the remedy, and the poison. Now and then in an introductory lecture or at a professional soirée we lament in a very becoming manner,

that of some fifty thousand volumes written on medicine and surgery a large proportion should be made up of utterly useless speculation; and then proceed to do precisely the same thing in another form, as if resolved that we at any rate will not change with the changing times.

"Tempora mutantur, nos non mutamur in illis."

Indeed if a prophet were raised from the dead to teach men what no living prophet will ever teach them, viz. not to think themselves infallible, and if he were in want of a text by which more than any other he could show how little they are disposed to learn experience from the past, and how easily dogmatism usurps the place due only to labour and genius, he might choose the sad lot which has befallen so many beautiful theories. Certainly their inventors never dreamed that they might one day become the theme of such a homily; on the contrary each one in his turn seems to have been perfectly satisfied that he had discovered this secret, when, alas, he was only maintaining the pyramid on its apex to fall before the first breath of opposition. Perhaps they thought it was their duty to let off a theory; at any rate many persons seem to think this is a necessary step towards treating a disease, through which each doctor must go just as he takes measles in childhood. Every man has his views about consumption," a friend said to me one day, "and B. has his you know." This however is of less moment, as after a year or two nobody reads theories, for which they perhaps console themselves by moralizing on the fate awarded to the dis

coveries of other men; and who would not be proud to cast in his lot with Harvey, Galileo, and Jenner? In all ages readers seem to have troubled themselves very little about the matter, or to have occupied themselves with crotchets equally groundless and preposterous. Alas, to crown all an ungrateful posterity classes their labours with those of the ingenious philosopher whom Mr. Gulliver found trying to carve sunbeams out of cucumbers and calcine ice into gunpowder, or of the metaphysicians who demonstrated that the number of angels who could dance on the point of a needle was neither more nor less than ten thousand, and that any one who sought to diminish this number even by a cypher, was a monster only fit to be burned at the stake and have his ashes scattered to the four winds of heaven.

The mind insensibly fills with melancholy on reviewing the long vistas of the past, crowded with the debris of structures ushered into the world with so much certainty that they would survive and now so utterly forgotten; of theories supported with so much useless hostility and bitterness and upheld by so much labour; the toil of years surviving only in the form of ruins, on which shines here and there some grand truth like a star shedding its mild and beneficent light on a long-deserted city.

In other arts, or in sciences, terms to which such a latitude could be given are not allowed, nor would the mere convictions, the silent assent of even a Newton, a Linnæus, or a Locke be admitted as a proof from which there was no appeal. Since the first shepherd counted and named the stars in the deep blue chaldean sky as he watched them from the plains of Shinar, it

had been held that a change in the weather was connected in some mysterious way with the revolutions of the moon. Not a husbandman sowed his fields, not a fisher spread his nets in the sea, not a hunter sought his prey on the wolds, but clung devoutly to this creed. Now we are told that in twenty years educated men will no more believe in it than in witchcraft, the changes being found to coincide about once in five times. Why is it that in medicine alone man improves so little on the rude traditions of ancient times, that while the subordinate parts such as anatomy and chemistry have advanced so far towards perfection, our knowledge of the real process of disease and the empire of medicine over them remains much as in the days of Ambrose Paré and Roger Bacon? that the discussion as to whether the cholera is contagious or not is the counterpart of the debates on the plague in Constantinople during the reign of Justinian in the sixth century, which ended by a majority of the citizens deciding against the contagious nature of the malady? a flight of time that takes us back to the days when the last insignia of republican Rome were borne through the streets of old Byzantium and the children of Artaxerxes were still seated on the tottering throne of the great king.

So needless, so profitless has this contest about the infectious nature of disease appeared to many observers, that a very ingenious attempt was made by Dr. Christison to explain the discrepancy by suggesting that it depends more upon a difference in the constitution of the mind that upon anything in the facts supporting either view, and Dr. Watson has