e parts of
the diseased air-passages, and heal by destroying the morbid
germs which perpetuate mischief therein. It need scarcely be said
the very existence of these causative microbes, much less any
mode of cure by their abolishment, was quite unknown to former
Herbal Simplers.

Again, in past times a large number of our native, plants acquired
a well-deserved, but purely empirical celebrity, for curing scrofula
and scurvy. But later discovery has shown that each of these
several herbs contains lime, and earthy salts, in a subtle form of
high natural sub-division: whilst, at the same time, the law of cure
by medicinal similars has established the cognate fact that to those
who inherit a strumous taint, infinitesimal doses of these earth
salts are incontestably curative. The parents had first undergone a
gradual impairment of health because of calcareous matters to
excess in their general conditions of sustenance; and the lime
proves potent to cure in the offspring what, through the parental
surfeit, was entailed as [xvii] a heritage of disease. Just in the
same way the mineral waters of Missisquoi, and Bethesda, in America,
through containing siliceous qualities so sublimated as almost to
defy the analyst, are effective to cure cancer, albuminuria, and
other organic complaints.

Nor is this by any means a new policy of cure. Its barbaric practice
has long since obtained, even in African wilds, where the native
snake doctor inoculates with his prepared snake poison to save the
life of a victim otherwise fatally bitten by another snake of the
same deadly virus. To Ovid, of Roman fame (20 B.C.), the same
sanative axiom was also indisputably known as we learn from his
lines:--

"Tunc observatas augur descendit in herbas;
Usus et auxilio est anguis ab angue dato."

"Then searched the Augur low mid grass close scanned
For snake to heal a snake-envenomed hand."

And with equal cogency other arguments, which are manifold,
might be readily adduced, as of congruous force, to vindicate our
claim in favour of analytical knowledge over blind experience in
the methods of Herbal cure, especially if this be pursued on the
broad lines of enlightened practice by similars.

So now, to be brief, and to change our allegory, "on the banks of
the Nile," as Mrs. Malaprop would have pervertingly put it, with
"a nice [xviii] derangement of epitaphs," we invite our many
guests to a simple "dinner of herb