It is cheap to laugh at these ideas and practices, but we have ourselves passed, in this matter, through the same stage. We had our day of such remedies, when we attempted to cure diseases, and to dispel evil influences with charms and amulets; and to ensure success by having recourse to the luck that was supposed to be in days, and things, and names, and places. The memory of all this has not, even yet, completely vanished from amongst us. The echo of it may still at times be heard. The history of all people shows that these things contain the germ of the empirical art of medicine. The first step in real progress is the abandonment of the idea that disease is the irreversible decree of heaven, or of fate. The second stage, that in which the Orientals now are, is the metaphysical treatment of disease—that which assumes that each disease is to be met by something which, from some fancied analogy, or fitness, or antagonism, it is supposed ought to counteract it. This is futile in itself, but not in its ulterior consequences, for it issues eventually in the discovery of the true remedies. In time, if circumstances favour, the subject comes to be treated scientifically. Every ailment is then deliberately examined, with the view of discovering in what it actually consists; and remedies are applied which, in accordance with the known laws and properties of things, it is reasonably hoped will check its growth or remove it. It is curious to observe, while we are on this subject, that homœopathy is only a reversion to old ways of thinking. Its foundation is a metaphysical dictum that like cures like. And its practice that these, or some other, globules will in each case produce artificially the desired disease, is as contrary to the evidence of the senses, and the known properties of the globules, as anything to be found in Arab therapeutics. CHAPTER XL. ORIENTAL CLEANLINESS. Wash and be clean.—_II. Kings._ On the subject of cleanliness, Orientals’ ideas are the very reverse of what, to a time within the memory of the present generation of Englishmen, we entertained. Our idea used to be that it meant a clean shirt; theirs is that it means a clean skin. The Mr. Smith, who, some forty years ago, obtained, during his University career, his differentiating epithet from his practice of changing his linen three times a day, would probably, from unfamiliarity with the bath, have been regarded by Orientals, as might many a beau of that, and of the preceding generation, as an insufferably dirty fellow. The annoyance Thackeray represents an old lawyer in chambers as feeling at the daily splashings of the young barrister over his head, and his inability to imagine how sanity of mind, or body, could be compatible with such a practice, fix the date, now about thirty years ago, when our manners and customs were changing on this point.