stress; in which even the wisest and most cautious practitioners confess that their art is at best only a species of guessing; while the patient can no more judge of the remedies he consents, with so much faith, to swallow on the knowledge of him who prescribes them, than he can of the perturbations of Jupiter’s satellites.  Yet the moment he is sick, away he goes to this dubious oracle, and trusts it with a most instructive faith and docility, as if it were infallible.  All his doubts are mastered in an instant.  I strongly suspect yours would be.  Ought you not in consistency to refuse to act at all in such deplorable deficiency of evidence?”

“Well,” said he, “consistent or inconsistent, it must be admitted that the parallel is very complete,—­and amusing.”  And he then went on, as he was apt to do, when an analogy struck his fancy.  “Let me see,—­yes, our unlucky race is condemned to put its most valued possession on the hazard of a wise choice, without any of the essential qualifications for wisely making it; a man cannot at all tell whether his particular priest in medicine understands and can skilfully apply even his own theory.  Yes,” he went on, “and I think (as you say) we might find, not only in the partisans of different systems of physic, the representatives of the various priesthoods, but in their too credulous—­or shall we say, too faithful patients? —­the representatives of all sects.  There is, for example, the superstitious vulgar in medicine,—­the gross worshipper of the Fetish, who believes in the efficacy of charm, and spell, and incantation, of mere ceremonial and opus operatum; then there is the polytheist, who will adore any thing in the shape of a drug, and who is continually quacking himself with some nostrum or other from morning to night; who not only takes his regular physician’s prescriptions, but has his household gods of empirical remedies, to which he applies with equal devotion.  Then there is the Romanist in medicine, who swears by the infallibility of some papal Abernethy, and the unfailing efficacy of some viaticum of a blue pill.”

“And who,” said I, “would represent our friend who has just left the room, and who has tried every thing?”

“Why,” he replied, “I think he is in the condition of a little boy of whom I heard a little while ago, whose mother was a homoeopathist, and kept a little chest, from which she dispensed to her family and friends, perhaps as skilfully as the doctor himself could have done.  The little fellow, going into her dressing-room, opened this box, and, thinking that he had fallen on a score of ‘millions’ (as children call them), swallowed up his mother’s whole doctor’s shop before he could be stopped.  It was happy, said the doctor, when called in, that the little patient had swallowed so many, or he would have been infallibly killed.  Or perhaps we may liken our friend to that humorous traveller, Mr. Stephens, who tells us, that, having been provided at Cairo,