Another supposed illustration of the Homoeopathic law is the alleged successful management of burns, by holding them to the fire. "This is a popular mode of treating those burns which are of too little consequence to require any more efficacious remedy, and would inevitably get well of themselves, without any trouble being bestowed upon them. It produces a most acute pain in the part, which is followed by some loss of sensibility, as happens with the eye after exposure to strong light, and the ear after being subjected to very intense sounds. This is all it is capable of doing, and all further notions of its efficacy must be attributed merely to the vulgar love of paradox. If this example affords any comfort to the Homoeopathist, it seems as cruel to deprive him of it as it would be to convince the mistress of the smoke-jack or the flatiron that the fire does not literally draw the fire out, which is her hypothesis. "But if it were true that frost-bites were cured by cold and burns by heat, it would be subversive, so far as it went, of the great principle of Homoeopathy. For you will remember that this principle is that _Like_ cures _Like_, and not that _Same_ cures _Same_; that there is _resemblance_ and not _identity_ between the symptoms of the disease and those produced by the drug which cures it, and none have been readier to insist upon this distinction than the Homoeopathists themselves. For if _Same_ cures _Same_, then every poison must be its own antidote,--which is neither a part of their theory nor their so-called experience. They have been asked often enough, why it was that arsenic could not cure the mischief which arsenic had caused, and why the infectious cause of small-pox did not remedy the disease it had produced, and then they were ready enough to see the distinction I have pointed out. "O no! it was not the hair of the same dog, but only of one very much like him!" The belief in and employment of the "Infinitesimal doses," Doctor Holmes handles with the same fairness and acumen; but the absurd idea affirmed by Hahnemann that Psora is the cause of the great majority of chronic diseases, he treats as it deserves, with unqualified contempt. In conclusion, he says, "As one humble member of a profession which for more than two thousand years has devoted itself to the pursuit of the best earthly interests of mankind always assailed and insulted from without by such as are ignorant of its infinite perplexities and labors, always striving in unequal contest with the hundred armed giants who walk in the noonday and sleep not in the midnight, yet still toiling not merely for itself and the present moment, but for the race and the future, I have lifted up my voice against this lifeless delusion, rolling its shapeless bulk into the path of a noble science it is too weak to strike or to injure."