.
not xvi. Amsterdam. Wetstein, 1755.]

In speaking of the oil of anise-seed, Hahnemann says that Forestus
observed violent colic caused by its administration. But, as the author
tells the story, a young man took, by the counsel of a surgeon, an acrid
and virulent medicine, the name of which is not given, which brought on
a most cruel fit of the gripes and colic. After this another surgeon was
called, who gave him oil of anise-seed and wine, "which increased his
suffering." [Observ. et Curat. Med. lib. XXI obs. xiii. Frankfort,
1614.] Now if this was the Homoeopathic remedy, as Hahnemann pretends,
it might be a fair question why the young man was not cured by it. But
it is a much graver question why a man who has shrewdness and learning
enough to go so far after his facts, should think it right to treat them
with such astonishing negligence or such artful unfairness.

Even if every word he had pretended to take from his old authorities
were to be found in them, even if the authority of every one of these
authors were beyond question, the looseness with which they are used to
prove whatever Hahnemann chooses is beyond the bounds of credibility.
Let me give one instance to illustrate the character of this man's
mind. Hahnemann asserts, in a note annexed to the 110th paragraph of
the "Organon," that the smell of the rose will cause certain persons to
faint. And he says in the text that substances which produce peculiar
effects of this nature on particular constitutions cure the same
symptoms in people in general. Then in another note to the same
paragraph he quotes the following fact from one of the last sources one
would have looked to for medical information, the Byzantine Historians.

"It was by these means (i.e. Homoeopathically) that the Princess Eudosia
with rose-water restored a person who had fainted!"

Is it possible that a man who is guilty of such pedantic folly as
this,--a man who can see a confirmation of his doctrine in such a
recovery as this,--a recovery which is happening every day, from
a breath of air, a drop or two of water, untying a bonnet-string,
loosening a stay-lace, and which can hardly help happening, whatever
is done,--is it possible that a man, of whose pages, not here and there
one, but hundreds upon hundreds are loaded with such trivialities, is
the Newton, the Columbus, the Harvey of the nineteenth century!

The whole process of demonstration he employs is this. An experiment is
institu