out the way for others to
follow them; yet we must allow that the more able and learned chemists
have greatly enriched and improved the materia medica since, by making
many curious experiments, and thereby discovering several new and very
efficacious medicines, not only from the semi-metals, mercury and
antimony, and the various chemical preparations from them, but from the
more perfect metals, and some other mineral bodies, as well as from a
great variety of remedies which are prepared both from vegetable and
animal substances, as salts, oils, essences, spirits, tinctures,
elixirs, extracts and many more needless here to be mentioned, but all
of which are known to physicians. For all these we are indebted to the
chemists who first invented and introduced them into practice; although
the use and application, as well as the methods of administering them to
the sick, to cure various other diseases than those they were first used
for, has been greatly improved by several learned and ingenious
physicians.

FOOTNOTES:

[142] See Demonologia, by J.S.F. p. 40.

[143] See Magazine of Natural History, April, 1830.

CHAPTER XXI.

MODERN EMPIRICISM.

In one respect we have but very little occasion to extol our own
enlightened age at the expence of those ages which are so frequently and
justly termed _dark_. We allude to the bold and artful designs of
imposture, and particularly _medical imposture_. Daily are seen
illiterate and audacious empirics sporting with the lives of a credulous
public, that seem obstinately resolved to shut their ears against all
the suggestions of reason and experience. The host of empirics,
mountebanks, and self-dubbed hygeists, which infest the metropolis, and
the tinctures, cordials, pills, balms, and essences, so much extolled by
their retailers, and swallowed by the public, are indeed so many proofs
of the credulity of the age, that to say the least, the march of
intellect has evidently made a _faux-pas_ in this direction.

The celestial beds, the enchanting magnetic powers introduced into this
country by Messmer, a German quack, and his numerous disciples, the
prevailing indifference to all dietetic precepts, the singular
imposition practised on many females, in persuading them to wear the
inert acromatic belts, the strange infatuation of the opulent in paying
five guineas for a pair of _metallic tractors_, not worth sixpence, the
tables for blood-letting, and other absurdities sti