"Our want of success results from the following causes: FIRST.--Ignorance of the law governing disease. SECOND.--Our ignorance of a suitable remedy THIRD.--Want of efficacy in the remedy; and finally we have assisted in multiplying disease; nay, we have done more: we have increased their mortality." Professor CHAPMAN, who stood at the head of the profession in Philadelphia, in an address to the medical society, after speaking of the pernicious effects of calomel, adds: "Gentlemen, it is a disgraceful reproach to the profession of medicine; it is quackery, horrid unwaranted murderous quackery.... But I will ask another question, who is it that can stop the career of mercury at will, after it has taken the reins into its own destructive and ungovernable hands? He, who for an ordinary cause resigns the fate of his patient to mercury is a vile enemy to the sick; and if he is tolerably popular, will, in one successful season, have paved the way for the business of life, for he has enough to do ever afterwards to stop the mercurial breach of the constitutions of his dilapidated patients." And yet, this article of the _Materia Medica_ in some of its various forms, is still more frequently prescribed than any other by the allopathic physicians. A writer in the June number, 1868, of the "London Chemist," having submitted to a careful examination one thousand prescriptions, taken _seriatim_ from the files of a druggist, states, among other curious facts, that mercury takes the lead, and stands prominently at the head of the list. Mercury, the very name of which strikes terror into the minds of nervous and timid patients, is still the foremost remedial agent employed by the medical profession. Professor DRAPER, in one of his introductory lectures, before the University College of New York, makes the following statement: "Even those of us who have most carefully upheld our old professional theories, and have tried to keep in reverence the old opinions, and the old times, find that under the advance of the exact sciences our position is becoming untenable. The ground is slipping away from beneath our feet. We are on the brink of a great revolution. Go where you will, among intelligent physicians you will find a deep, though it may be an indistinct perception, that a great change is imminent." The late Professor MUTTER of Philadelphia, in an introductory lecture a few years ago, says: "We have in truth, rested contented in ideal knowledge. We have received as perfect, theories as idle as day dreams. We have blindly accepted the follies of the past; and the foundation of our art must crumble to the earth unless we learn more discretion and better judgment in the selection of the material of which they are to be constructed."