I am not disposed to deny the occasional injurious effect of the materializing influences to which the physician is subjected.  A spiritual guild is absolutely necessary to keep him, to keep us all, from becoming the “fingering slaves” that Wordsworth treats with such shrivelling scorn.  But it is well that the two callings have been separated, and it is fitting that they remain apart.  In settling the affairs of the late concern, I am afraid our good friends remain a little in our debt.  We lent them our physician Michael Servetus in fair condition, and they returned him so damaged by fire as to be quite useless for our purposes.  Their Reverend Samuel Willard wrote us a not over-wise report of a case of hysteria; and our Jean Astruc gave them (if we may trust Dr. Smith’s Dictionary of the Bible) the first discerning criticism on the authorship of the Pentateuch.  Our John Locke enlightened them with his letters concerning toleration; and their Cotton Mather obscured our twilight with his “Nishmath Chajim.”

Yet we must remember that the name of Basil Valentine, the monk, is associated with whatever good and harm we can ascribe to antimony; and that the most remarkable of our specifics long bore the name of “Jesuit’s Bark,” from an old legend connected with its introduction.  “Frere Jacques,” who taught the lithotomists of Paris, owes his ecclesiastical title to courtesy, as he did not belong to a religious order.

Medical science, and especially the study of mental disease, is destined, I believe, to react to much greater advantage on the theology of the future than theology has acted on medicine in the past.  The liberal spirit very generally prevailing in both professions, and the good understanding between their most enlightened members, promise well for the future of both in a community which holds every point of human belief, every institution in human hands, and every word written in a human dialect, open to free discussion today, to-morrow, and to the end of time.  Whether the world at large will ever be cured of trusting to specifics as a substitute for observing the laws of health, and to mechanical or intellectual formula as a substitute for character, may admit of question.  Quackery and idolatry are all but immortal.

We can find most of the old beliefs alive amongst us to-day, only having changed their dresses and the social spheres in which they thrive.  We think the quarrels of Galenists and chemists belong to the past, forgetting that Thomsonism has its numerous apostles in our community; that it is common to see remedies vaunted as purely vegetable, and that the prejudice against “mineral poisons,” especially mercury, is as strong in many quarters now as it was at the beginning of the seventeenth century.  Names are only air, and blow away with a change of wind; but beliefs are rooted in human wants and weakness, and die hard.  The oaks of Dodona are prostrate, and the shrine of Delphi is desolate; but the Pythoness