In the application of each of the remedies which have been mentioned, for the cure of both tonic and atonic dropsies, great care should be taken to use them in such a manner, as to accommodate them to the strength and excitability of the patient's system. The most powerful remedies have often been rendered _hurtful_, by being given in too large doses in the beginning, and _useless_, by being given in too small doses in the subsequent stages of the disease. I have avoided saying any thing of the usual operations for discharging water from different parts of the body, as my design was to treat only of the symptoms and cure of those dropsies which affect the whole system. I shall only remark, that if tapping and punctures have been more successful in the early, than in the late stage of these diseases, it is probably because the sudden or gradual evacuation of water takes down that excessive action in the arterial system, which is most common in their early stage, and thereby favours the speedy restoration of healthy action in the exhaling or lymphatic vessels. Thus have I endeavoured to prove, that two different states of action take place in dropsies, and have mentioned the remedies which are proper for each of them under separate heads. But I suspect that dropsies are often connected with a certain _intermediate_ or mixed action in the arterial system, analogous to the typhoid action which takes place in certain fevers. I am led to adopt this opinion, not only from having observed mixed action to be so universal in most of the diseases of the arterial and nervous system, but because I have so frequently observed dropsical swellings to follow the scarlatina, and the puerperile fever, two diseases which appear to derive their peculiar character from a mixture of excessive and moderate _force_, combined with irregularity of action in the arterial system. In dropsies of mixed action, where too much force prevails in the action of some, and too little in the action of other of the arterial fibres, the remedies must be debilitating or stimulating, according to the greater or less predominance of tonic or atonic diathesis in the arterial system. I shall conclude this history of dropsies, and of the different and opposite remedies which have cured them, by the following observations. 1. We learn, in the first place, from what has been said, the impropriety and even danger of prescribing stimulating medicines indiscriminately in every case of dropsy.