Swallowers of globules, one of your little pellets, moistened in the mingled waves of one million lakes of alcohol, each two miles in circumference, with which had been blended that one drop of Tincture of Camomile, would be of precisely the strength recommended for that medicine in your favorite Jahr’s Manual, “against the most sudden, frightful, and fatal diseases!” [In the French edition of 1834, the proper doses of the medicines are mentioned, and Camomile is marked IV.  Why are the doses omitted in Hull’s Translation, except in three instances out of the whole two hundred remedies, notwithstanding the promise in the preface that “some remarks upon the doses used may be found at the head of each medicine”?  Possibly because it makes no difference whether they are employed in one Homoeopathic dose or another; but then it is very singular that such precise directions were formerly given in the same work, and that Hahnemann’s “experience” should have led him to draw the nice distinctions we have seen in a former part of this Lecture (p. 44).]

And proceeding on the common data, I have just made a calculation which shows that this single drop of Tincture of Camomile, given in the quantity ordered by Jahr’s Manual, would have supplied every individual of the whole human family, past and present, with more than five billion doses each, the action of each dose lasting about four days.

Yet this is given only at the quadrillionth, or fourth degree of potency, and various substances are frequently administered at the decillionth or tenth degree, and occasionally at still higher attenuations with professed medicinal results.  Is there not in this as great an exception to all the hitherto received laws of nature as in the miracle of the loaves and fishes?  Ask this question of a Homoeopathist, and he will answer by referring to the effects produced by a very minute portion of vaccine matter, or the extraordinary diffusion of odors.  But the vaccine matter is one of those substances called morbid poisons, of which it is a peculiar character to multiply themselves, when introduced into the system, as a seed does in the soil.  Therefore the hundredth part of a grain of the vaccine matter, if no more than this is employed, soon increases in quantity, until, in the course of about a week, it is a grain or more, and can be removed in considerable drops.  And what is a very curious illustration of Homoeopathy, it does not produce its most. characteristic effects until it is already in sufficient quantity not merely to be visible, but to be collected for further use.  The thoughtlessness which can allow an inference to be extended from a product of disease possessing this susceptibility of multiplication when conveyed into the living body, to substances of inorganic origin, such as silex or sulphur, would be capable of arguing that a pebble may produce a mountain, because an acorn can become a forest.