doing this, and also in being as curiously misunderstood and
misrepresented as if it had been a political harangue. This gave it more
local notoriety than it might otherwise have attained, so that, as I
learn, one ingenious person made use of its title as an advertisement to
a production of his own.

The commonest mode of misrepresentation was this: qualified propositions,
the whole meaning of which depended on the qualifications, were stripped
of these and taken as absolute. Thus, the attempt to establish a
presumption against giving poisons to sick persons was considered as
equivalent to condemning the use of these substances. The only important
inference the writer has been able to draw from the greater number of the
refutations of his opinions which have been kindly sent him, is that the
preliminary education of the Medical Profession is not always what it
ought to be.

One concession he is willing to make, whatever sacrifice of pride it may
involve. The story of Massasoit, which has furnished a coral, as it
were, for some teething critics, when subjected to a powerful logical
analysis, though correct in its essentials, proves to have been told with
exceptionable breadth of statement, and therefore (to resume the
metaphor) has been slightly rounded off at its edges, so as to be
smoother for any who may wish to bite upon it hereafter. In other
respects the Discourse has hardly been touched. It is only an
individual's expression, in his own way, of opinions entertained by
hundreds of the Medical Profession in every civilized country, and has
nothing in it which on revision the writer sees cause to retract or
modify. The superstitions it attacks lie at the very foundation of
Homoeopathy, and of almost every form of medical charlatanism. Still the
mere routinists and unthinking artisans in most callings dislike whatever