He went to London with the view of introducing a hydraulic machine, which he and his Vermont friends regarded as a very important invention.  He found, however, that the machine was already in common use in that metropolis.  A brother Yankee, then in London, had started the project of a mill, which was to be carried by the water of the Thames.  He was sanguine enough to purchase one fifth of this concern, which also proved a failure.  At about the same period he wrote the work which proved the great excitement of his mind upon the subject of the transient folly then before the public.  Originally a lawyer, he was in succession a mechanician, a poet, and an editor, meeting with far less success in each of these departments than usually attends men of less varied gifts, but of more tranquil and phlegmatic composition.  But who is ignorant that there is a class of minds characterized by qualities like those I have mentioned; minds with many bright and even beautiful traits; but aimless and fickle as the butterfly; that settle upon every gayly-colored illusion as it opens into flower, and flutter away to another when the first has dropped its leaves, and stands naked in the icy air of truth!

Let us now look at the general tenor of the arguments addressed by believers to sceptics and opponents.  Foremost of all, emblazoned at the head of every column, loudest shouted by every triumphant disputant, held up as paramount to all other considerations, stretched like an impenetrable shield to protect the weakest advocate of the great cause against the weapons of the adversary, was that omnipotent monosyllable which has been the patrimony of cheats and the currency of dupes from time immemorial,—­Facts!  Facts!  Facts!  First came the published cases of the American clergymen, brigadier-generals, almshouse governors, representatives, attorneys, and esquires.  Then came the published cases of the surgeons of Copenhagen.  Then followed reports of about one hundred and fifty cases published in England, “demonstrating the efficacy of the metallic practice in a variety of complaints both upon the human body and on horses, etc.”  But the progress of facts in Great Britain did not stop here.  Let those who rely upon the numbers of their testimonials, as being alone sufficient to prove the soundness and stability of a medical novelty, digest the following from the report of the Perkinistic Committee.  “The cases published [in Great Britain] amounted, in March last, the date of Mr. Perkins’s last publication, to about five thousand.  Supposing that not more than one cure in three hundred which the Tractors have performed has been published, and the proportion is probably much greater, it will be seen that the number, to March last, will have exceeded one million five hundred thousand!”

Next in order after the appeal to what were called facts, came a series of arguments, which have been so long bruised and battered round in the cause of every doctrine or pretension, new, monstrous, or deliriously impossible, that each of them is as odiously familiar to the scientific scholar as the faces of so many old acquaintances, among the less reputable classes, to the officers of police.