I have already mentioned the motives attributed by the Perkinists to the Medical Profession, as preventing its members from receiving the new but unwelcome truths.  This accusation is repeated in different forms and places, as, for instance, in the following passage:  “Will the medical man who has spent much money and labor in the pursuit of the arcana of Physic, and on the exercise of which depends his support in life, proclaim the inefficacy of his art, and recommend a remedy to his patient which the most unlettered in society can employ as advantageously as himself? and a remedy, too, which, unlike the drops, the pills, the powders, etc., of the Materia Medica, is inconsumable, and ever in readiness to be employed in successive diseases?”

As usual with these people, much indignation was expressed at any parallel between their particular doctrine and practice and those of their exploded predecessors.  “The motives,” says the disinterested Mr. Perkins, “which must have impelled to this attempt at classing the metallic practice with the most paltry of empyrical projects, are but too thinly veiled to escape detection.”

To all these arguments was added, as a matter of course, an appeal to the feelings of the benevolent in behalf of suffering humanity, in the shape of a notice that the poor would be treated gratis.  It is pretty well understood that this gratuitous treatment of the poor does not necessarily imply an excess of benevolence, any more than the gratuitous distribution of a trader’s shop-bills is an evidence of remarkable generosity; in short, that it is one of those things which honest men often do from the best motives, but which rogues and impostors never fail to announce as one of their special recommendations.  It is astonishing to see how these things brighten up at the touch of Mr. Perkins’s poet: 

  “Ye worthy, honored, philanthropic few,
   The muse shall weave her brightest wreaths for you,
   Who in Humanity’s bland cause unite,
   Nor heed the shaft by interest aimed or spite;
   Like the great Pattern of Benevolence,
   Hygeia’s blessings to the poor dispense;
   And though opposed by folly’s servile brood,
   enjoy the luxury of doing good.”

Having thus sketched the history of Perkinism in its days of prosperity; having seen how it sprung into being, and by what means it maintained its influence, it only remains to tell the brief story of its discomfiture and final downfall.  The vast majority of the sensible part of the medical profession were contented, so far as we can judge, to let it die out of itself.  It was in vain that the advocates of this invaluable discovery exclaimed over their perverse and interested obstinacy,—­in vain that they called up the injured ghosts of Harvey, Galileo, and Copernicus to shame that unbelieving generation; the Baillies and the Heberdens,—­men whose names have