with all the water in the Thames, and one drop (or a million gallons if you like) of this mixture given with any expectation of possible effect.

Recollect that if for millions of millions of years the patient were every second to swallow millions of millions of gallons, he could not succeed in getting into his stomach the millionth part of a drop or grain of any mother tincture or crude drug.

Can any mistake be shown in this ? If not what answer has any sane man who deals in these dilutions (delusions had almost slipped from my pen)?

I am not suggesting that these dilutions cannot easily be made with very small quantities of the diluting fluid; ninety-nine drops for each dilution, if only any one could be trusted to have made them. What I desire to call attention to is the quality of the drug contained in the 30th (not to say the 200th) dilution, supposing them honestly prepared.

I trust that you and your readers will feel that this is a matter to be most seriously dealt with.

If those who are in the habit of prescribing one drop of a vast river with which at its source one grain of a drug was mixed have no other ground to rest on than thin fallible judgment as to what seemed to be results, the allopath who gives his scruples and drachms has far more justification when he asks you to rely on his experience as sufficient evidence that he beneficially affects the course of disease by his treatment. In his case it may be admitted that effects of some kind will be produced, and the only question will be whether they are curative. In the case of the high dilutionist, the first question will be as to the possibility of any fractional part being forthcoming of the evidence which ordinary intelligence must require before it can assent to what is so utterly inconceivable.-Yours, &c., N.

[We think our anonymous correspondent can hardly be fully acquainted with homoeopathic literature if he thinks that the mere numerical aspect of dilution has not been repeatedly presented. But we give place to his remarks, as it may be useful from time to time to bring the facts before the busy practitioner. We are under the impression that the above statement considerably underrates the bulk of the total mass required to dilute, to ensure the attenuation within the 30th. We have likewise a novelty in our VOL. XXXII, NO. CXXVII.—JANUARY, 1874.

M

correspondent's letter in that he writes out at length the denominator of the fraction corresponding to the 200th dilution, but we have not space to reproduce it, as it occupies 431 inches at the rate of 9.17 ciphers to the inch.

We fear our correspondent is rather sanguine as to the effect that the mere statement of these facts must have on rational beings having any influence on high dilutionists, for we find no longer ago than August, 1872, Dr. H. Hartlaub writing thus: "In homœopathy it is not with small doses that we have to do, but with immaterial doses; these are the peculiarity of homoeopathy, and it is these which place a boundary between what belongs to homeopathy and what is foreign to it." And again : "The homoeopathic preparation of medicines has for its object not the dilution nor the decomposition of the matter, but the removal of it altogether." And again: "To constitute true homœopathy we reckon not only the simile strictly according to the proving on the healthy, as well as single medicines without any foreign admixture, but also the immaterial dose, which is that without which the total mass has neither spirit nor life. With this spirit and life of the medicine stands or falls the spirit and life of the whole of homœopathy" (Allgem. Hom. Zeitung, August, 1872). Against ideas like this what avail all the wealth of facts and reasoning offered to us by physics, chemistry and physiology? We can only protest against and repudiate the pretentious presumption of such dreamers to put forward their silly speculations as the creed of the homoeopathic school. It is almost sufficient to quote one paragraph from Hahnemann to dispose of these pretensions. In the Organon, 5th edit., p. 288, we find the following words addressed to those who doubt the possibility of the action of the ordinary homœopathic dilutions: "They may learn from the mathematician that a substance when divided into ever so many parts still contains in the smallest imaginable part some of the substance, and the smallest imaginable part cannot cease to be some portion of this substance and thus cannot possibly become nothing" [i. e. immaterial].

But as the old vague notions of spiritual essences as the cause of the properties or qualities of things, and the possibility of a separation of those spiritual essences from the matter to which they were supposed to be attached by a not insoluble bond, may still lie at the root of that credulity and want of true philosophical method which is conspicuous in dealing

with the "potency" question by all so-called high dilutionists, it may be well to say a few words on the subject in its old form and in the newer one of a "force" supposed to be capable of being set free. Hahnemann unfortunately for a time fell into the chemical blunder of supposing that Causticum was the "principle of causticity" which was detached from an alkali and held in combination for the time by an indifferent substance. But this was speedily recognised as an error. Nevertheless a similar idea of the possible detachment of the specific virtue of medicine from the material substance still apparently haunts some minds, and against that it is impossible to argue if those who believe it hold the doctrine that the properties of matter reside in superadded immaterial essences. From these, however, we can only demand rigid proof of the action of each dilution by ordinary experiment. What can we know about immaterial essences and the effect of dilution upon them? Can you dilute an immaterial substance? And if you could, what good or harm could it do? But to those who talk of " medicinal force" capable of transference and transformation we can hold a different language, and tell them beforehand that the whole idea lies in mere confusion and misapprehension of the meaning of the word force. It is only common force-in all probability, merely motion either molar or molecular of the particles of matter—which is capable of transference and transformation, while the specific properties which distinguish one kind of matter, whether simple or compound, from another, are inherent in the matter itself and incapable of being either detached from it or being manifested by any other kind of matter. All the specific powers of medicine with which it is our business to deal belong to these inherent intransferable properties, and consequently can only be manifested while some portion of the actual material is present. However little of this specific action of a substance be required it is necessary that matter must be divisible to the extent of the dilution that may be in question. But there are very strong reasons for holding the finite divisibility of matter, and of late Sir W. Thomson has given good grounds for supposing that the size of the ultimate atom may be ascertained approximately and that far below our higher dilutions.

Gaudin has calculated the size of the ultimate particles of matter on different data from those used by Thomson, and come to much the same conclusion. In illustration he states that in a sphere of ordinary matter the size of a pin's head the num

ber of chemical atoms amounts to eight thousand trillions, or 8000,000000,000000,000000; and thus to count the number of distinct metallic particles in the head of a pin, at the rate, mentally, of a thousand millions each second, would take 250,000 years. Here we have ample room and verge enough for supplyng millions of distinct particles to every square inch of the body from a single grain of any of our ordinary lower attenuations, if only they were equally distributed. But it is different with respect to the dilutions above the trillionth; for if the above calculations are approximatively correct, if we imagine one grain divided equally among a trillion drops of water, then each drop will contain one atom or indivisible particle. How, then, if you put one drop into ninety-nine fresh drops of water? We shall then have one particle in 100 drops of water, and if you wish to dilute that again in the same way, there must be ninety-nine chances to one that the next phial will contain none of the substance. It cannot be certainly said that the limit of size is reached at the trillionth; but it seems certain that some such limit must exist probably not far beyond it.

If such calculations are near the truth, then the distance between the molecules must become so great that the chance of some one of the series of our dilutions having none of the matter at all must ere long be reached, though at what point that result is reached it may be impossible to say. This would throw a doubt and uncertainty on all experiments with high dilutions, for the 20th, or 30th, or 50th, &c., might in one batch contain some, in another none of the matter at all. This may be illustrated more palpably by referring to the particles of organic matter which are the causes of contagious diseases. If, as is now most probable, these consist of living matter, then that is not soluble, but however small can only be held in suspension, and therefore not equally diffusible at all. Let us now suppose one particle of smallpox matter, the smallest portion capable of propagating the disease, thrown into drinking water actually drunk on any day which all the inhabitants of London had an equal chance of swallowing. Then it is plain that it is about three millions to one against any particular individual getting the smallpox, supposing all were susceptible, and the particle escapes all other chance of having its efficacy destroyed. If matter is not more divisible than calculated by Sir W. Thomson and Gaudin, this

illustration gives but a faint idea of the enormous chance against the efficacy of the highest dilutions. But when we add to that all the other uncertainties engendered by the impurities of materials, and possibility of error in manipulation in the preparation, those in dispensing, and beyond that the still greater chances of neutralization, loss, and destruction in the secretions and fluids of the body before the extremely attenuated portion of matter can come into contact with the living matter on which it is finally to act, then we shall begin to understand the extreme uncertainty that must cling to the action of all highly diluted medicines, even granting, what we by no means grant, that the dose of a well-chosen homoeopathically specific medicine can never be too small to effect a cure. Our conclusion from these à priori considerations would be that, although possibly the higher dilutions might, in singular instances, effect cures, they would be quite unsuitable for ordinary practice, and that in proportion to the liability of error, all experimentation with them must be conducted on a larger scale and under far more rigid conditions of proof than with the lower and more massive doses. Now, it is not the case that the so-called experiments with the high dilutions, i.e., 50th, 200th and upwards, have been made by men of proved capacity for such delicate investigation, by men who have at the same time knowledge, skill, and patience in the diagnosis and treatment of disease according to the known methods, and who have only advanced by slow steps from one well-ascertained stage to another. The contrary rather has been conspicuously evident, and men of possibly small experience with the 3rd and 6th dilution have leaped at a bound to the inconceivable height of the 200th on the slenderest evidence. The whole thing, in fact, was begun in a blunder or fraud by Jenichen, not a medical man at all, and has been carried on with a levity and disregard of the solemn responsibilities of the physician which has repeatedly caused us to blush with shame. Few things have retarded the progress of what is true in the homoeopathic doctrines than this whole unfortunate episode of the high dilutions.

We do not mean to say that the question of the relative efficiency of the dilutions above and below the 3rd centesimal has been altogether left to the desultory experiments of private practice, for some systematic series of experiments have been undertaken by the Vienna Hospital physicians; but they are