journals being occupied with subjects of more permanent interest.  The state of things in London is best learned, however, from the satirical poem to which I have already alluded as having been written at the period referred to.  This was entitled, “Terrible Tractoration!!  A Poetical Petition against Galvanizing Trumpery and the Perkinistic Institution.  Most respectfully addressed to the Royal College of Physicians, by Christopher Caustic, M. D., LL.  D., A. S. S., Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, Aberdeen, and Honorary Member of no less than nineteen very learned Societies.”  Two editions of this work were published in London in the years 1803 and 1804, and one or two have been published in this country.

“Terrible Tractoration” is supposed, by those who never read it, to be a satire upon the follies of Perkins and his followers.  It is, on the contrary, a most zealous defence of Perkinism, and a fierce attack upon its opponents, most especially upon such of the medical profession as treated the subject with neglect or ridicule.  The Royal College of Physicians was the more peculiar object of the attack, but with this body, the editors of some of the leading periodicals, and several physicians distinguished at that time, and even now remembered for their services to science and humanity, were involved in unsparing denunciations.  The work is by no means of the simply humorous character it might be supposed, but is overloaded with notes of the most seriously polemical nature.  Much of the history of the subject, indeed, is to be looked for in this volume.

It appears from this work that the principal members of the medical profession, so far from hailing Mr. Benjamin Douglass Perkins as another Harvey or Jenner, looked very coldly upon him and his Tractors; and it is now evident that, though they were much abused for so doing, they knew very well what they had to deal with, and were altogether in the right.  The delusion at last attracted such an amount of attention as to induce Dr. Haygarth and some others of respectable standing to institute some experiments which I shall mention in their proper place, the result of which might have seemed sufficient to show the emptiness of the whole contrivance.

The Royal Society, that learned body which for ages has constituted the best tribunal to which Britain can appeal in questions of science, accepted Mr. Perkins’s Tractors and the book written about them, passed the customary vote of thanks, and never thought of troubling itself further in the investigation of pretensions of such an aspect.  It is not to be denied that a considerable number of physicians did avow themselves advocates of the new practice; but out of the whole catalogue of those who were publicly proclaimed as such, no one has ever been known, so far as I am aware, to the scientific world, except in connection with the short-lived notoriety of Perkinism.  Who were the people, then, to whose activity, influence, or standing with the community was owing all the temporary excitement produced by the Metallic Tractors?