"Homoeopathy and its Kindred Delusions" was published nearly twenty years
ago, and has been long out of print, so that the author tried in vain to
procure a copy until the kindness of a friend supplied him with the only
one he has had for years. A foolish story reached his ears that he was
attempting to buy up stray copies for the sake of suppressing it. This
edition was in the press at that very time.

Many of the arguments contained in the Lectures have lost whatever
novelty they may have possessed. All its predictions have been submitted
to the formidable test of time. They appear to have stood it, so far,
about as well as most uninspired prophecies; indeed, some of them require
much less accommodation than certain grave commentators employ in their
readings of the ancient Prophets.

If some statistics recently published are correct, Homoeopathy has made
very slow progress in Europe.

In all England, as it appears, there are hardly a fifth more Homoeopathic
practitioners than there are students attending Lectures at the
Massachusetts Medical College at the present time. In America it has
undoubtedly proved more popular and lucrative, yet how loose a hold it
has on the public confidence is shown by the fact that, when a specially
valued life, which has been played with by one of its agents, is
seriously threatened, the first thing we expect to hear is that a regular
practitioner is by the patient's bed, and the Homoeopathic counsellor
overruled or discarded. Again, how many of the ardent and capricious
persons who embraced Homoeopathy have run the whole round of pretentious
novelties;--have been boarded at water-cure establishments, closeted with
uterine and other specialists, and finally wandered over seas to put
themselves in charge of foreign celebrities, who dosed them as lustily as