I have had abundant opportunities of verifying the warning expressed in No. 721, "pregnant women should use the drug very cautiously." I am not acquainted with any drug which seems possessed of such reliable virtues regarding the prevention of miscarriage, more particularly during the first half of pregnancy, as Apis. I have often become an involuntary spectator of the power of Apis to effect miscarriage; for I had given it to honest women who did not know that they were pregnant, and where the fact of pregnancy was revealed to them by the subsequent miscarriage, which took place after one or two doses of Apis had been taken. Ever since I have made it a rule not to give Apis to females in whom the existence of pregnancy can be suspected in the remotest degree until the matter is reduced to a certainty, and the conduct of the physician can be determined upon in accordance with existing facts. I am unable to say how far this power inherent in Apis, of producing miscarriage, may be serviceable to females who are prone to miscarriage. I beg the privilege of adding a more general warning to this particular one. The more generally useful a thing is, the more liable is it to abuse. The most important and useful discoveries of homœopathy are abused in this manner by our age given to all sorts of excesses. Not only are the records of homœopathy ransacked by speculative minds, who use her advantages for personal gain without giving due credit to the source whence the good things are obtained. This species of egotism may perhaps be excused in consideration of the use which this kind of plagiarism affords, even if whole volumes should be filled with it. But if the stolen property is paraded before the world as something belonging to one's self by right divine; if official influence is abused for the purpose of dressing up that which rightfully belongs to our science, as some original discovery, thus caricaturing and disfiguring the beauty of the genuine blessing; then good is changed to evil, and the evil is the greater, the more comprehensive the truth that is so shamefully abused. It is absurd and may entail sad consequences upon the world, if the rational use of Apis is to be converted to the irrational proceedings of the so-called specific method, which is often practised by men who, knowing better, purposely conceal the truth from the world. For years past, I have been called upon again and again, by patients who had been in the hands of these men, and who had been drenched with medicine, and had had all sorts of disastrous complications engendered in their poor bodies, to afford them some relief from these tortures inflicted by physicians who do not hesitate to assail the health of their patients by massive doses of drugs, of which they often know nothing but the name.