The name of Harvey, whose great discovery was the legitimate result of his severe training and patient study, should be mentioned only to check the pretensions of presumptuous ignorance.  The example of Jenner, who gave his inestimable secret, the result of twenty-two years of experiment and researches, unpurchased, to the public,—­when, as was said in Parliament, he might have made a hundred thousand pounds by it as well as any smaller sum,—­should be referred to only to rebuke the selfish venders of secret remedies, among whom his early history obliges us reluctantly to record Samuel Hahnemann.  Those who speak of the great body of physicians as if they were united in a league to support the superannuated notions of the past against the progress of improvement, have read the history of medicine to little purpose.  The prevalent failing of this profession has been, on the contrary, to lend a too credulous ear to ambitious and plausible innovators.  If at the present time ten years of public notoriety have passed over any doctrine professing to be of importance in medical science, and if it has not succeeded in raising up a powerful body of able, learned, and ingenious advocates for its claims, the fault must be in the doctrine and not in the medical profession.

Homoeopathy has had a still more extended period of trial than this, and we have seen with what results.  It only remains to throw out a few conjectures as to the particular manner in which it is to break up and disappear.

1.  The confidence of the few believers in this delusion will never survive the loss of friends who may die of any acute disease, under a treatment such as that prescribed by Homoeopathy.  It is doubtful how far cases of this kind will be trusted to its tender mercies, but wherever it acquires any considerable foothold, such cases must come, and with them the ruin of those who practise it, should any highly valued life be thus sacrificed.

2.  After its novelty has worn out, the ardent and capricious individuals who constitute the most prominent class of its patrons will return to visible doses, were it only for the sake of a change.

3.  The Semi-Homoeopathic practitioner will gradually withdraw from the rotten half of his business and try to make the public forget his connection with it.

4.  The ultra Homoeopathist will either recant and try to rejoin the medical profession; or he will embrace some newer and if possible equally extravagant doctrine; or he will stick to his colors and go down with his sinking doctrine.  Very few will pursue the course last mentioned.

A single fact may serve to point out in what direction there will probably be a movement of the dissolving atoms of Homoeopathy.  On the 13th page of the too frequently cited Manifesto of the “Examiner” I read the following stately paragraph: 

“Bigelius, M. D., physician to the Emperor of Russia, whose elevated reputation is well known in Europe, has been an acknowledged advocate of Hahnemann’s doctrines for several years.  He abandoned Allopathia for Homoeopathia.”  The date of this statement is January, 1840.  I find on looking at the booksellers’ catalogues that one Bigel, or Bigelius, to speak more classically, has been at various times publishing Homoeopathic books for some years.