as potent for harm as these were for good.  Many were narcotics or valuable anesthetics, local or otherwise, which have proved to be the creators of habits more terrible than the age-long enemies of mankind, alcohol and opium.  When the man whose wife takes a coal-tar derivative for headache finds that it stills her heart forever, the incident affects his whole opinion of drugs.  When the patient for whom one of the new drugs has been prescribed by a practitioner without knowledge of his idiosyncrasies reacts to it fatally, it is slight consolation to his survivors that his case is described in print under the heading, “A Curious Case of Umptiol Poisoning.”  When a mother sees her son go to the bad by taking cocaine, or heroin, or some other drug of whose existence she was ignorant a dozen years ago, she may be pardoned for believing that all drugs, or at least all newly discovered drugs, are tools of the devil.

And this feeling is intensified by one of our national faults—­the tendency to jump at conclusions, to overdo things, to run from one evil to its opposite, without stopping at the harmless mean.  We think we are brighter and quicker than the Englishman or the German.  They think we are more superficial.  Whatever name you give the quality it causes us to “catch on” sooner, to work a good thing to death more thoroughly and to drop it more quickly for something else, than any other known people, ancient or modern.  Somebody devises a new form of skate roller that makes roller-skating a good sport.  We find it out before anyone else and in a few months the land is plastered from Maine to California with huge skating halls or sheds.  Everybody is skating at once and the roar of the rollers resounds across the oceans.  We skate ourselves out in a year or two, and then the roar ceases, the sheds decay and roller-skating is once more a normal amusement.  Then someone invents the safety bicycle, and in a trice all America, man, woman and child, is awheel.  And we run this good horse to death, and throw his body aside in our haste to discover something new.  Shortly afterward someone invents a new dance, or imports it from Spanish America, and there is hardly time to snap one’s finger before we are all dancing, grandparents and children, the cook in the kitchen and the street-cleaner on the boulevard.

We display as little moderation in our therapeutics.  We can not get over the idea that a remedy of proved value in a particular case may be good for all others.  Our proprietary medicines will cure everything from tuberculosis to cancer.  If massage has relieved rheumatism, why should it not be good also for typhoid?  The Tumtum Springs did my uncle’s gout so much good; why doesn’t your cousin try them for her headaches?  And even so, drugs must be all good or bad.  Many of us remember the old household remedies, tonics or laxatives or what not, with which the children were all dosed at intervals, whether they were ill or not.  That was in the days when