I would extend the hospitality of these shelves to a class of works which we are in the habit of considering as being outside of the pale of medical science, properly so called, and sometimes of coupling with a disrespectful name.  Such has always been my own practice.  I have welcomed Culpeper and Salmon to my bookcase as willingly as Dioscorides or Quincy, or Paris or Wood and Bache.  I have found a place for St. John Long, and read the story of his trial for manslaughter with as much interest as the laurel-water case in which John Hunter figured as a witness.  I would give Samuel Hahnemann a place by the side of Samuel Thomson.  Am I not afraid that some student of imaginative turn and not provided with the needful cerebral strainers without which all the refuse of gimcrack intelligences gets into the mental drains and chokes them up,—­am I not afraid that some such student will get hold of the “Organon” or the “Maladies Chroniques” and be won over by their delusions, and so be lost to those that love him as a man of common sense and a brother in their high calling?  Not in the least.  If he showed any symptoms of infection I would for once have recourse to the principle of similia similibus.  To cure him of Hahnemann I would prescribe my favorite homoeopathic antidote, Okie’s Bonninghausen.  If that failed, I would order Grauvogl as a heroic remedy, and if he survived that uncured, I would give him my blessing, if I thought him honest, and bid him depart in peace.  For me he is no longer an individual.  He belongs to a class of minds which we are bound to be patient with if their Maker sees fit to indulge them with existence.  We must accept the conjuring ultra-ritualist, the dreamy second adventist, the erratic spiritualist, the fantastic homoeopathist, as not unworthy of philosophic study; not more unworthy of it than the squarers of the circle and the inventors of perpetual motion, and the other whimsical visionaries to whom De Morgan has devoted his most instructive and entertaining “Budget of Paradoxes.”  I hope, therefore, that our library will admit the works of the so-called Eclectics, of the Thomsonians, if any are in existence, of the Clairvoyants, if they have a literature, and especially of the Homoeopathists.  This country seems to be the place for such a collection, which will by and by be curious and of more value than at present, for Homoeopathy seems to be following the pathological law of erysipelas, fading out where it originated as it spreads to new regions.  At least I judge so by the following translated extract from a criticism of an American work in the “Homoeopatische Rundschau” of Leipzig for October, 1878, which I find in the “Homoeopathic Bulletin” for the month of November just passed:  “While we feel proud of the spread and rise of Homoeopathy across the ocean, and while the Homoeopathic works reaching us from there, and published in a style such as is unknown in Germany, bear eloquent testimony to the eminent activity of our transatlantic colleagues, we are overcome by sorrowful regrets at the position Homoeopathy occupies in Germany.  Such a work [as the American one referred to] with us would be impossible; it would lack the necessary support.”