last vol., p. 674), in which he declared, among other things, that at his advanced age his desire was to retire from medical practice altogether and obtain repose for his few remaining years by the affectionate care of his beloved wife. He mentions that he has divided his property among his children and grand-children, reserving to himself only 12,000 thalers (less than £2000). For this distribution of his property he alleges his children are indebted to the generosity and unselfishness of his new wife. And then follow the most violent denunciations and threats against any of his family by his first wife should they ever hereafter dispute the right of this amiable second wife to any of the property he may leave behind him after his death in Paris. As he had just solemnly renounced all intention to continue practice and earn any more money, it looked all fair and right that his new wife should be undisturbed in the possession of the little he might leave behind him out of the small sum he took away with him from Coethen; still, the denunciations and threats seem altogether disproportioned to the temptation to the possible offence they were directed against. However, events showed that the threats of heavy penalties were not a mere brutum fulmen, but were inspired by an eminently prudent and far-seeing genius.

Madame Mélanie carried off her aged swain. The French biographer had previously informed us that when Hahnemann first came to Coethen the populace were so infuriated at their town being desecrated by the presence of such a notorious quack, that they threatened him with violence, uttered catcalls beneath his windows, and broke his panes of glass with stones; according to the same veracious authority, the same populace, with characteristic fickleness, now wished to retain Hahnemann in their midst by force, so that he was obliged to escape from Coethen secretly and in the dead of night. It need hardly be said that both these stories are without foundation. Hahnemann never met with any insult from the peaceable Coetheners during his fifteen years' stay among them, and he left Coethen in open day, accompanied as far as Halle by the surviving members of his

family. The repose Hahnemann looked forward to enjoying in Paris in the society of his beloved wife, does not seem to have been granted him. Madame Hahnemann obtained from Guizot's government the requisite permission to practise, and the old man plunged into the full career of an enormous practice. In Coethen his patients consisted chiefly of strangers attracted to the place by his eminence, or who consulted him by letter, but in Paris, where, be it remembered, he desired to retire altogether from the labours of his profession, his rooms were crowded with patients all the morning; and whereas in Coethen he never visited any patient besides his excellent patron, Duke Ferdinand, now in Paris, his afternoons were spent in driving about visiting patients at their houses. By this arduous and incessant toil he is said to have amassed a fortune of 4,000,000 of francs, which by the terms of his will his family were excluded from laying any claim to under the severest penalties. The worldly wisdom that dictated the penal clauses of the will must be obvious to every one. It need hardly be said that the fortunate inheritor of all this wealth has taken good care that none of the first family should ever see a farthing of it.

It is well known that during his residence in Paris Hahnemann had but little intercourse with medical men. Their visits to him, if not absolutely denied, were studiously discouraged, and his medical converse was almost limited to non-medical gobemouches, who eagerly swallowed as gospel every thing he said, and encouraged him in the path of theorising, which was his weak point, as his later works show. In these we cannot fail to miss the influence of some healthy opposition, like that which in 1833 prevented him upsetting his own sound maxim to give but one medicine at a time, as narrated at p. 412 of this volume. Dilettante doctors, and clergymen and women with a craze for dabbling in physic, who seem to have been his chief associates, were not the sort of people to exercise the same wholesome control over his too erratic fancies, as had formerly been done by the Trinkses, Haubolds, and Müllers of his native country, and accordingly we find that the works of his old age show more

of a tendency to fanciful speculation and less of the Baconian appeal to facts and experiments than the productions of his prime of life. This circumstance will detract considerably from the value and interest attending the publication of any hitherto unpublished works written during the last ten years of his life.

During his last illness it is well known that no medical man of Paris or elsewhere was admitted to attend him, and we have the testimony of his grandson, Dr. Süss Hahnemann, that he and his mother, Hahnemann's favorite child, were refused admission to the bedside of their dying relative. That the great founder of homoeopathy should have been buried at an early hour in the morning, unattended by any of his numerous disciples, who would have been eager to pay this last honour to their venerated master, only shocks us less than that now, twenty-two years after his death, his resting place should still be some nameless and undistinguished vault in the cemetery of Montmartre.

The numerous manuscripts left behind him by Hahnemann have been kept by his widow carefully concealed, notwithstanding repeated requests to her that all, or a selection of them, might be published. Perhaps we should never have heard from the possessor of them that there were any, had it not been that Dr. Süss Hahnemann, at the request of a German bookseller, advertised the publication of a new edition of the Organon, to meet the demand for that work, it being long since out of print. Lutze had already issued a falsified edition of the Organon, but this drew forth no sign from Madame Hahnemann. It was only when the great man's grandson threatened to publish a true and exact edition of the work that his widow was roused to assert, nearly a quarter of a century after her husband's death, that she was in possession of a new edition of the Organon written by Hahnemann himself, and that the time was now come, brought on by the grandson's impending publication, for it to see the light.

Now we quite agree with Dr. Trinks in thinking that an Organon rewritten by Hahnemann shortly before his death,

will fail to satisfy the requirements of our art or of science, and though its appearance may excite a good deal of curiosity among his disciples, the advance of the medical sciences and the progress of sound criticism have been so great during the last twenty years, that a work written so long ago must fail to correspond with the present state of homœopathy, and still less with that of physiology and pathology.

Moreover, before we can accept the promised new edition of the Organon by Madame Hahnemann as the genuine expression of Hahnemann's latest views, we should, in the event of its differing materially from the last edition published during his lifetime, be thoroughly assured that the alterations are his own. Madame Hahnemann says she has the manuscript of her promised new edition in Hahnemann's own handwriting. Is this manuscript written in French or German? or are there two manuscripts, one in each language, as we are informed on the best authority that Madame Hahnemann proposes to publish an edition in both languages simultaneously? We learn from the same excellent authority that a number of American homœopathists, among whom is Dr. Constantine Hering, have requested Madame Hahnemann to allow them to translate her forthcoming edition of the Organon. Now we would hope that these gentlemen will not give the sanction of their names to any edition of a work of Hahnemann of whose genuineness there can be the least doubt.

The only way that occurs to us of proving that the new Organon with its alterations is the genuine expression of Hahnemann's thoughts, is to refer the manuscript—which Madame Hahnemann asserts is in Hahnemann's own handwriting to a committee of well-known and respected homœopathic physicians, who shall certify to their authenticity. If however, as Madame Hahnemann boasts of having acted as Hahnemann's secretary, the manuscript of the new edition of the Organon is wholly or chiefly in her handwriting, then her promised work will lose even the historical interest that it would otherwise have had for the student of homœopathy. Any way, genuine or falsified, the new edition of the

Organon can have no authority with the homoeopathic practitioners of the present day, and at best can be regarded only as an antiquarian curiosity.

But Madame Hahnemann has in her possession other manuscripts by her late husband, the interest and importance of which to his disciples cannot be impaired by time, and which she has no right to retain locked up and inaccessible to them. On his removal to Paris, in the full expectation that he was retiring from the active practice of his profession, he gave to his daughters the manuscript journals of the cases treated by him. When, however, he found that in Paris he had to carry on an immense practice, he begged his daughters to send him these manuscripts, promising that they should be returned to them after his decease. What could be more interesting to the homœopathist than to be able to peruse and study a selection of these histories of cases treated by Hahnemann? From the specimens given us in the second volume of the R. A. M. L., we see the accurate and minute manner in which Hahnemann kept the records of the cases he treated, and we cannot help feeling indignant that the voluminous records of his practice during the best years of his life should be kept locked up by his widow, who possesses no manner of right to them. The publication of these, and not of any new edition of the Organon, is what would contribute most to the advantage of homoeopathy and the assistance of its adherents in their practice.

The Cattle Plague, with Suggestions for its Treatment by Homœopathy. By JAMES MOORE, M.R.C.V.S. London, Simpkin, Marshall, and Co., 1856.

THIS is an excellent account of the "Rinderpest," or murrain that is at present devastating our cattle and causing such consternation among the beef-growers and beef-eaters of this country. As the medicinal treatment suggested by