ency of a plain
statement of facts and reasons, I submit the subject to the discernment
of my audience.

The question may be asked in the outset,--Have you submitted the
doctrines you are professing to examine to the test of long-repeated and
careful experiment; have you tried to see whether they were true or not?
To this I answer, that it is abundantly evident, from what has often
happened, that it would be of no manner of use for me to allege the
results of any experiments I might have instituted. Again and again have
the most explicit statements been made by the most competent persons of
the utter failure of all their trials, and there were the same abundant
explanations offered as used to be for the Unguentum Armarium and the
Metallic Tractors. I could by no possibility perform any experiments
the result of which could not be easily explained away so as to be of no
conclusive significance. Besides, as arguments in favor of Homoeopathy
are constantly addressed to the public in journals, pamphlets, and even
lectures, by inexperienced dilettanti, the same channel must be open to
all its opponents.

It is necessary, for the sake of those to whom the whole subject may
be new, to give in the smallest possible compass the substance of
the Homoeopathic Doctrine. Samuel Hahnemann, its founder, is a German
physician, now living in Paris, [Hahnemann died in 1843.] at the age of
eighty-seven years. In 1796 he published the first paper containing his
peculiar notions; in 1805 his first work on the subject; in 1810 his
somewhat famous "Organon of the Healing Art;" the next year what
he called the "Pure Materia Medica;" and in 1828 his last work, the
"Treatise on Chronic Diseases." He has therefore been writing at
intervals on his favorite subject for nearly half a century.

The one great doctrine which constitutes the basis of Homoeopathy as a
system is expressed by the Latin aphorism,

"SIMILIA SIBILIBUS CURANTUR,"

or like cures like, that is, diseases are cured by agents capable
of producing symptoms resembling those found in the disease under
treatment. A disease for Hahnemann consists essentially in a group
of symptoms. The proper medicine for any disease is the one which is
capable of producing a similar group of symptoms when given to a healthy
person.

It is of course necessary to know what are the trains of symptoms
excited by different substances, when administered to persons in health,
if any such can b