I had been reading far into the dim avenues of night, and when finally I cast from me the _Lancet_, with all its marvellous chronicles of the eternal battle between Science and Death, I passed into a dream-survey of therapeutics; wherein the subject, touched by a liberated imagination, launched me upon visions so real, so tremendous, that, waking once more, I arose and set them down in the dawn-light. I seemed to wander by that road along which our mighty sons of healing will march in time to come. My phantom survey traversed the far past, the present, the remote future; it bore me through the whole history of medicine and surgery, of human diseases and their discovered remedies. From the science as indicated in Homeric poetry under the ægis of Æsculapius, to the system of Hippocrates; from the Alexandrian school and great empiric doctrines, to Roman methods--to Pliny, Galen, Aretæus, and other early lights--I progressed. I saw also the schemes of Arabic medicine; glanced at the science as expounded and practised in the Middle Ages; saw Paracelsus in his laboratory; Van Helmont, the mystic; and Bacon, the philosopher. Still sweeping forward upon the lightning pinions of a dream, I passed from the seventeenth to the eighteenth century and beheld new ideas, new theories, new systems plentiful as the sands upon the sea-shore. A mechanical theory of disease was then the favoured conceit, and I noted Cheyne writing his survey of fever upon that basis; I saw Mead putting forth his treatise on _The Power of the Sun and Moon over Human Bodies_; I examined Keill’s application of Newtonian principles to the explanation of humanity’s physical machinery. Then arose that mighty Boerhaave and his school; Hoffmann of Halle, with his notion of a universal ether permeating all regions of the body; Stahl and his “animism”; Haller, Morgagni, Cullen, Brown, and Avenbrugger--a genius of Vienna, who invented the method by which ailments of the lungs were first investigated by percussion. Then, through that astounding age of miracles, the Nineteenth Century, I passed, although to elaborate that spectacle of accumulated achievements were vain in this place. Suffice it that at length I reached the point whereat I closed my _Lancet_ before sleeping; and yet, contrary to my expectations, the panoramic vision still unrolled, still swiftly sped onwards and onwards to strange matters as yet hidden within the void of Time to come. Now indeed might the unfolding phantasmagoria arrest my senses, for the Nineteenth Century was past, the Twentieth also (marked by a horror in its midst), with many successive ages--whose tremendous records were written and sealed--mere foundation stones, deep buried beneath the river of the Past, for the fair structure of the Present uplifted upon them.