yesterday's
sun. The water was calm and glassy as a mirror, and it reflected in
broad patches, like so many islands dispersed over it, every colour of
the rainbow. I cannot attempt to describe it; the effect was heavenly,
and all I could say was, with the Mussulman, "God is great!"

CHAPTER THIRTY EIGHT.

In this world we are so jealous of any discovery being made, that
innovation is immediately stigmatised as quackery. I say innovation,
for improvement is not the term. The attempt to improve is innovation,
the success of the experiment makes it an improvement. And yet how are
we to improve without experiment? Thus we have quackery in everything,
although not quite so severely visited as it formerly was by the
Inquisition who would have burnt alive him who asserted that the sun did
not go round the earth, but the earth round the sun. In medicine,
quackery is the most frequently stigmatised. We know but little of the
human frame as far as medicine is to act upon it. We know still less of
the virtues of various plants which will effect a cure. We are
acquainted with a few but there are hundreds equally powerful, the
properties of which we are ignorant of. Could we add to medical science
the knowledge of the African negroes and Indians, which they so
carefully conceal from us, our pharmacopoeia would be much extended.
When metallic medicines were first introduced into general use by a
physician, an ancestor of mine, and the wonderful effect of them
established by the cures, the whole fraternity was up in arms, and he
was decried us a quack; notwithstanding which, the works he wrote have
gone through twenty five editions, and the doses prescribed by him are
to this day made use of by the practitioners.

The fact is, that although the surgical knowledge of the day is very
perfect, the medical art is still in its infancy. Even the quackeries
which fail should not be despised, for they have proved something,
although they could not be perfected. Animal magnetism, for instance:
it failed, but still it discovered some peculiar properties, some
sympathies of the human body, which may hereafter give a clue to more
important results. The great proof of the imperfection of medical
science is the constant change made by the profession itself. One
medicine is taken into favour, it is well received every where, until
the faculty are tired of it, and it sinks into disgrace. Even in my
time I have seen many change