being generally adopted; but if the numerous reports of their efficacy
which have been published are forgeries, or are unfounded, the practice
ought to be crushed." To this I merely add, it has been crushed.

The following sentence applies to that a priori judging and uncandid
class of individuals who buy their dinners without tasting all the food
there is in the market. "On all discoveries there are persons who,
without descending to any inquiry into the truth, pretend to know, as it
were by intuition, that newly asserted facts are founded in the grossest
errors. These were those who knew that Harvey's report of the
circulation of the blood was a preposterous and ridiculous suggestion,
and in latter later days there were others who knew that Franklin
deserved reproach for declaring that points were preferable to balls for
protecting buildings from lightning."

Again: "This unwarrantable mode of offering assertion for proof, so
unauthorized and even unprecedented except in the condemnation of a
Galileo, the persecution of a Copernicus, and a few other acts of
inquisitorial authority, in the times of ignorance and superstition,
affords but a lamentable instance of one of his remarks, that this is far
from being the Age of Reason."

"The most valuable medicines in the Materia Medica act on principles of
which we are totally ignorant. None have ever yet been able to explain
how opium produces sleep, or how bark cures intermittent fevers; and yet
few, it is hoped, will be so absurd as to desist from the use of these
important articles because they know nothing of the principle of their
operations." Or if the argument is preferred, in the eloquent language
of the Perkinistic poet: