the electro-vital fluid, along with the current from the machine, to it from under the positive pole, and thus increase the action by making it more positive. But suppose I do what nearly all of the doctors do, who use electricity with any regard to polarity; that is, if treating acutely inflamed eyes, for example, apply the negative pole to the eyes, thinking thereby to make them more negative; or, if treating amaurosis, apply the positive electrode to the affected parts, thinking thereby to make them more positive! I say, suppose I do this same thing, do you not see that, by the fixed laws of electricity, I necessarily increase the evils that I would remedy? Do you not see that, by placing my negative pole on the already overcharged and inflamed eyes, I attract to them yet more of the electro-vital fluid, and so increase their positive condition and aggravate the inflammation? and that, by presenting my positive electrode to the eyes already more or less paralyzed, I repel what little electro-vitality there was there, and so make the nerves all the more negative and dead? And yet, I repeat it, this is precisely the plan of almost all the men who use electricity in therapeutic practice with any regard to its polarization. They treat a positive disease--rather, a _hypersthenic_ disease, (for they seldom know anything of the _electrical_ states of diseased parts), with the negative pole, and an azoödynamic disease, which is negative, with the positive pole!--all directly antagonistic to science and success. But the great mass of physicians, who attempt to treat electrically, have no knowledge either of the electrical condition of the various forms of disease, nor of the distinctive and peculiar effects produced by either pole of the artificial current; and consequently all their use of this powerful agent is entirely empirical--merely haphazard experiment.