The credit of introducing Cinchona rests between the Jesuits, the Countess of Chinchon, the Cardinal de Lugo, and Sir Robert Talbor, who employed it as a secret remedy. (Pereira.) Mercury as an internal specific remedy was brought into use by that impudent and presumptuous quack, as he was considered, Paracelsus. (Encyc. Brit. art. “Paracelsus.”) Arsenic was introduced into England as a remedy for intermittents by Dr. Fowler, in consequence of the success of a patent medicine, the Tasteless Ague Drops, which were supposed, “probably with reason,” to be a preparation of that mineral. (Rees's Cyc. art. “Arsenic.”) Colchicum came into notice in a similar way, from the success of the Eau Medicinale of M. Husson, a French military officer. (Pereira.) Iodine was discovered by a saltpetre manufacturer, but applied by a physician in place of the old remedy, burnt sponge, which seems to owe its efficacy to it. (Dunglison, New Remedies.) As for Sulphur, “the common people have long used it as an ointment” for scabies. (Rees's Cyc. art. “Scabies.”) The modern cantiscorbutic regimen is credited to Captain Cook. “To his sagacity we are indebted for the first impulse to those regulations by which scorbutus is so successfully prevented in our navy.” (Lond. Cyc. Prac. Med. art. “Scorbutus.”) Iron and various salts which enter into the normal composition of the human body do not belong to the materia medica by our definition, but to the materia alimentaria. For the first introduction of iron as a remedy, see Pereira, who gives a very curious old story. The statement in the text concerning a portion of the materia medica stands exactly as delivered, and is meant exactly as it stands. No denunciation of drugs, as sparingly employed by a wise physician, was or is intended. If, however, as Dr. Gould stated in his “valuable and practical discourse” to which the Massachusetts Medical Society “listened with profit as well as interest,” “Drugs, in themselves considered, may always be regarded as evils,”--any one who chooses may question whether the evils from their abuse are, on the whole, greater or less than the undoubted benefits obtained from their proper use. The large exception of opium, wine, specifics, and anaesthetics, made in the text, takes off enough from the useful side, as I fully believe, to turn the balance; so that a vessel containing none of these, but loaded with antimony, strychnine, acetate of lead, aloes, aconite, lobelia, lapis infernalis, stercus diaboli, tormentilla, and other approved, and, in skilful hands, really useful remedies, brings, on the whole, more harm than good to the port it enters.