their prey with impunity, and no one tells of their thousand victims concealed in the silent grave! It is from a similar empirical source, that the public is annoyed by a disgusting display of quack and _patent medicines_; which, through the medium of newspapers, are impudently palmed upon public attention. It would seem as though a host of ignorant impostors have leagued in hostility against the profession of medicine, wishing to despoil it of its dignity and usefulness, and prostrate its character in the dust. The world is inundated with nostrums, usurping the power, not only to remedy all the diseases of our nature, but actually to fortify the human constitution, and render it invulnerable. In their ostentatious display, they extol a single nostrum as adequate to the prevention and cure of a whole catalogue of diseases, however opposite or discordant in their nature. They are suited to all constitutions, as the shoe-black's composition is applicable to _every one's boots or shoes_. Thus are we kindly invited, at the expense of a few dollars, to purchase of those self 'dubbed doctors,' that health and longevity which even the judicious hand of science is unable to bestow. The inventors and venders of these pretended specifics, in most instances, have no knowledge of the diseases which they pretend to cure; they depend, as it were, on a random shot, and whatever may be the issue, they are sure of their enormous gains, from two to four hundred per cent; articles sold for a dollar might be afforded for ten cents. By such fraud and imposition, a noted Charlatan in London accumulated such an immense fortune as to parade the streets in a splendid equipage, the effects of public credulity. But the public may be assured, that since the great improvements in chemical science, a large proportion of patent medicines have been analyzed, and are found to consist of old articles which physicians have expunged from their materia medica, to give place to more valuable and efficacious remedies. Here, then, is a boundless source of knavery and fraud,--but I desire to have it understood, that these observations are not to extend to all patentees of medical compositions, without exception, for all are not equally censurable. Few, indeed, there are, which scientific physicians are willing to concede may be of public utility. But that indiscriminate application in all cases and circumstances, should be most pointedly reprobated. Were the annual amount of money expended for useless nostrums made public, it would excite astonishment, and were the innumerable disappointments in their creative powers promulgated, public indignation and contempt would be the portion of the inventors and venders of patented nostrums.