We have endeavored to speak plainly and to the point in dealing with quacks and quackery, because it is a topic of sovereign importance and urgency. Hundreds upon hundreds of our population are plundered and poisoned by these medical pests of society, and if we have not made it plain that it is dangerous to have anything to do with the advertising doctors of New York or any other place, we have failed in our purpose. Their advertisements, their pamphlets, and their rascally little books, penetrate the remotest corners of the land. Curiosity leads the farmer's son or the apprentice to send for some advertised book to satisfy a craving for information, or to pander to an already diseased imagination, and the bad seed is sown. He is surprised, startled, and finally alarmed; and he writes. He is told in the reply that "I seek my remedies in far-off climes; some in the distant prairie, some in the ever-blooming balsam; in the southern climes, where eternal summer reigns, and on the top of the snow-clad Himalayas." Accompanying the reply is a recipe calling for articles having no existence, or for decoctions from plants unknown to botanists. But in whatever form the response comes, the result is uniform. Plunder, always plunder, in the first place; sometimes this is supplemented by murder; whole families are destroyed, insanity is engendered, and the victims of these vile knaves are driven headlong to destruction and an early grave. It has always been the dearest wish of a quack doctor to possess a diploma of some sort, no matter where or how dishonestly procured. Sometimes it was forged; sometimes second-hand; but however or wherever procured it was framed and conspicuously displayed in the "consulting" room. By the recent and entirely wholesome amendment of the law, however, those beguiling documents are no longer available. It is now imperative that the certificate of every physician must be filed with the County Clerk. Until this provision is observed, no doctor--no matter how eminent or well-qualified--can practice in New York. Many a quack, flourishing like a green bay-tree, was summarily brought to the "end of his tether," by this most wise legislative enactment. We would be derelict to the duty we owe to the public did we not here, and in this connection, state our emphatic opinion that the editors and proprietors of newspapers, as a rule, have hitherto looked too leniently on this subject of quackery and its baleful announcements. Happily some of our journals will not publish such advertisements, and no editor can excuse himself by saying that he is ignorant of the character of such announcements. It must be known to every man of experience that such advertisements are unfit for the perusal of young men or women, and it is surprising that the heads of families should permit newspapers containing those advertisements to enter their houses. As a well-known English author some-time since wrote: