consulted. Result: that the remainder of my medicine left in the bottle was administered in precisely the way I had ordered; and the effect, that the patients immediately recovered. When my bill was paid I received this bit of information, “how good a medicine that in the bottle!" In just such a way our wisdom is bought.

Since that time I have used stimulants, without quinine, for such cases. For the same purpose I have given a saturated tincture of the berries of xanthoxylum fraxineum. If the berries are strong -I don't say fresh, because I have seen them fresh, and coming from localities where the trees do not well mature-they act splendidly. For similar purposes I have used a strong saturated tincture of Eucalyptus globulus, and not found it wanting either. Ever since I have largely stimulated, and not once introduced inebriation among my patrons. What is the dose, you will ask me? Enough to get the desired result—be it a minute or exceedingly large potion, with Homeopathy entirely left out in the cold. I always anticipate the cold stage with large doses; give a stimulant moderately during febrile exacerbations, and sufficiently stimulated as they then are, I leave them alone in the sweating stage of the disease.

FEVER AND INFLAMMATION.*

BY SIMON P. TAFT, M. D., NEWARK, NEW JERSEY.

That fever and inflammation are very difficult subjects for man to comprehend is evident from the former and still continued great diversity of opinions of the most eminent medical scholars and physiologists. Therefore the general history of the progress of the opinions and the knowledge of physiologists and physicians who have made important discoveries, which have resulted in the general increase of knowledge among medical men to the present time, seems necessary for the right understanding of those pathological conditions called fever and inflammation.

From the earliest ages to the present time man's knowledge of himself personally, that is: of the material substances and forces which compose him, and of other external or relational sub

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jects, that is of external material phenomena and their forces, have undergone developmental change, as his knowledge advanced by experience and observation through his senses, that is seeing, hearing, feeling, tasting and smelling, with whatever measures and amount of reason he may have at the time, which measures and amount of reason have been gradually becoming more perfect, from the childish unreasoning savage mind, without any common measure, to the present reasoning intellect, with almost absolute perfect common measures.

The savage tribes have very crude conceptions of themselves, and when they observe that the young can be educated to fish and hunt, that they are influenced by motives, is an advanced and not a primary condition. This limited knowledge is the basis of their limited social relations, under which, with great difficulty, they exist. These primitive conceptions have been gradually and slowly unfolded by experience and observation during a long series of ages into the complicated conceptions of the present conditions of civilized society.

Even now the general knowledge of civilized man is very imperfect as to the laws of personality and relation, that is, of the physical laws of themselves, and the matter and inhering forces around them. But the process of progressive development continues to go on, and will continue so to do, as we now know, by the laws of co-relation of matter and its inhering forces, and, judging by the history of the past, it will until a definite knowledge of the true science of man is obtained.

Although the application of the scientific method which has been so successfully applied to the elucidation of the laws and forces of matter in the inorganic kingdoms, is now firmly established and acknowledged by all civilized nations, yet that these same physical laws are equally and as properly applicable for the elucidation of man and the entire organic kingdom of vegetable and animal and their inhering forces, is not either reasonable or possible, is a widely-prevailing opinion, shared alike by the educated and the ignorant of the present day. This class holds that science, as such, pertains only to the inorganic material world and its now acknowledged fixed laws. They decry its application to the study of the organic, living nature of man, and contend that organized beings, especially man, is

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governed, both structurally and functionally, in a peculiar transcendental manner only, this class being ignorant of the ultimate laws and forces governing the organized kingdoms. Hence our teachers, the theologians, legislators and statesmen, though professing and claiming to know how best to guide man in all his relations, are, as a class, extremely ignorant of the physical sciences in their application to organized beings, and refuse them as their guide.

There is a class at the present time of theological metaphysicians who set themselves up as teachers and assert that man does not, nor can he really know anything. And though he subjectively so imagines, yet it is not he, man, but God who does everything, and hence man doing nothing and really knowing nothing, he can only be, at least in this life, a metaphysician, and that subjectively; hence, metaphysicians always argue (as they call their talk), from the unknown to the known, without any common weights or measures. Some scientists blame theologians alone, but metaphysicians of every class reasoning, as they call it, from the unknown to the known, without any common measure, are equally unreliable. Had Luther been a scientific chemist, he could have determined bread and wine not to be flesh and blood and transubstantiation to be a chimera. We, however, as physicians and censors of the laws of health and disease, pronounce this course profoundly erroneous and hold that man and organic beings are not to be excepted from the solution of matter and its forces by the laws of the physical sciences, and that by the scientific method alone can man ever rise to a true solution and understanding of himself.

The past progress of man in knowledge has been in epochs of alternate activity and repose, caused by some new discovery being promulgated to the world, after a longer or a shorter period of apparent quiet and rest. Such was gravitation by Sir Isaac Newton. But the apparent repose was really the slow education of the common mind up to a standpoint capable of receiving and understanding, when the new doctrine was announced. Hence mental progress of the masses has not been apparently steady; man's growth in knowledge is slow; but those who have observed the unwonted progress of scientific thought during the last past century cannot fail to perceive that we are in

the midst of one of the most wonderful epochs of progress and evolution the world has ever experienced, not only in the knowledge of the inorganic world of matter and its forces, but that science has during that period successfully and triumphantly entered into the citadel of the organic kingdoms for their solution (man being one element, both in his organic structure and the functions of both body and mind) as his only proper and true exponent.

Man being the head of the vast scale of beings on this globe, it is inevitable that his knowledge of mind and terrestrial matter is the reflex action of the wisdom and scientific knowledge of the age in which he lives.

The ignorance of man as to the nature or composition of the inorganic or mineral kingdom, up to 1774, when Priestly discovered oxygen, precluded the possibility of any scientific and correct knowledge, not only of himself, but of all matter and force in the inorganic kingdoms as well.

But the triumph of science during a century from that time to this in analyzing the different ultimate elements of matter and its forces, enables us at this time to analyze all the sixtythree or five ultimate elements into their ultimate atomic and nascent state and to determine the weights and measures of the atoms, specific gravities, chemical equivalents, or combining numbers; in a word, we now have a complete knowledge of the composition of the ultimate elements, the atoms of which in their nascent state forming molecules, enter into the composition of the entire earth, its fauna and flora. But the analysis and synthesis of the ultimate elements of the inorganic kingdom were of small moment when compared with the consequences which have already and must continue to flow from the full and unobstructed application of the laws of the physical forces, not only to the inorganic, but to the organic kingdoms, vegetable and animal, man included.

As a necessary consequence of the metaphysical mode of reasoning, by individual speculative opinion without any common weights or measures, by which any question could be settled, the real being, man, as an entity for scientific examination by chemical analysis or by anatomical research, which last was rarely allowed, disappeared or rather never came into view.

Two fractions supposed to be quite independent of each other were substituted for the real entity, man: one fraction, dignified beyond measure, the mind; the other disgraced and ignored, the organized body: and hence from Plato to Sir Wm. Hamilton, who inscribed on the walls of his lecture-room: "On earth there is nothing great but man, in man there is nothing great but mind-" an absolute contradiction of facts. Hence a metaphysical mode of reasoning, falsely so-called, for many centuries was pursued and so confessedly vacant (acknowledged so by its own advocates) of any valuable results, that its partisans have even denied the existence of matter, and asserted that it was so unreal that it could be at any time made or unmade in a minute, by mere will-force; and finally the climax was reached, when metaphysicians boldly declared that the expectation was not to attain truth, that desideratum not being within the purview of man, either as to body or mind, both being under the supervision of supramundane powers.

In sharp contrast to this theory, without physical experiment by chemical analysis, or any common weights and measures by which to determine the facts of matter and its forces, stands the modern scientific mode of investigation.

The true physician, imbued with the correct spirit, but fearless in the inquiry for the true order and harmony of all personal and rational condition of matter and its inhering forces; ascertaining law by the discovery of facts, which are the elements of all law; raising no factitious distinction where there was no real distinction; suspending judgment as to the results of every experimental investigation, until tested in the crucible of personal experience; dispossessing himself of all prejudice; seeking only for the unadulterated truth; rejecting all assumptions for facts, as truths; relying only on experience and observation and verification for facts; only using weights and measurs which are common to all observers begins with the discovery of facts by experience, and by facts and facts only he rises patiently and cautiously to the knowledge of the principles, laws and phenomenal forms and forces. He studies man by the same rules and methods which have so successfully conducted to truth and knowledge in other departments of matter matter and its forces in the inorganic kingdoms.