ng yearly
to the per-centage of the ever-increasing bills of mortality. Many
an honest practitioner threw away lancet and saddle-bags in despair,
while quacks and medical charlatans, profiting by the wranglings of
the regulars, and the weariness of the people, drove a reckless
but well-paying trade, with nostrums of every character, from the
deadliest poison to the simplest house-hold herb.

BUT A BRIGTHER DAY WAS ABOUT TO DAWN.

In the picturesque town of Meissen, in the district of Cur Saxony,
lived an honest and worthy man, Christian Gottfried Hahnemann, an
intelligent, patriotic and highly esteemed, though unassuming
and unambitious member of that community, by trade a painter upon
porcelain, known under the name of Dresden-China.

On the 10th day of April, 1755, he was made happy by the birth of a
son, whom he named Samuel Christian Frederick. Amidst all the fond
hopes the parents cherished for their new-born babe, little did they
imagine to what a destiny the great Creator had appointed him. Of the
mother of this child not very much is known, save that she was modest,
industrious, intensely attached to her family, full of sympathy
with her children's aspirations, and ever-ready to aid them in their
schemes of pleasure or advancement. The infantile years of little
Hahnemann were spent amidst scenery so strikingly beautiful, as to
impress his young buoyant heart, even in those tender years, with an
admiration of Nature's handiwork, and so instill into him a love of
the works of God, which ever increased as he grew older. He was not
sent to school very young, not until he was eight years old; this will
perhaps partly account for the fact that when he did go, he manifested
an ardent thirst for knowledge, which was never slacked during his
long life-time. But he did not spend his first eight years of life
entirely in play. Those health-securing, physical-exhilarating and
developing exercises were occasionally relieved by lessons from his
father, and sometimes from his mother, in reading and writing, and by
frequent conversations of a religious and moral character.

These conversations laid deep the foundation of that undeviating
integrity, fixedness of purpose, unwavering conscientiousness and
unaffected reverence for the Divine Being, which ever characterized
this Medical Reformer in after life. The influence of this paternal
conversational instruction and moral training made him what he was,
as a school-boy, as