So far from anything _less_ than the beautifully simple views held out by Abernethy being necessary, we trust that we have, some of us, arrived, as we ought to do, at several improvements. But people will confound a _plain_ diet, or a select diet, with a _starving_ diet, and, hating restrictions altogether, naturally prefer a physician who is good-natured and assenting; still this assentation is being visited, we think, with a justly retributive reaction. Hydropathy, in many points, no doubt, tends to excite attention to the real desiderata; but it is nevertheless imperfect and dangerous, because evidently charged with a capital error. It entirely fails in that comprehensive view of the relations which exists in all animals between the various organs; and on a sustained recollection and examination of which, rests the safe treatment of _any one_ of them. It is, therefore, unsafe and unscientific. Again, it is illogical, because it proceeds, as regard the skin, on the suppressed premise, that it will obtain a natural reaction; a thing, in a very large number of cases, and those of the most serious kind, seldom to be calculated on. It is quite clear, therefore, that, so far as hydropathy does good, it effects it by the institution of diet, abstinence from alcohol, country air, exercise, agreeable society, and, _we_ will suppose, in some cases, appropriate care of the surface; all of which are, in a general sense, beneficial to the nervous system and the digestive organs—the points insisted on by Abernethy. So long as the Public are not better informed, and until medicine is more strictly cultivated as a science, they will necessarily be governed by the first impression on their feelings; and so long as this is the case, fallacies can never be exposed, except by the severe lessons of experience. To hope to reason successfully with those whose feelings induce them to adopt that which they decline to examine with their intellect, is madness, and is just what Terence says of some other feelings: "Nihilo plus agas Quam si des operam ut cum ratione insanias." But, although, therefore, we are neither hydropathists nor homœopathists, we begin to see, in the very success of these things, some good; and that the "great shadow of the evil" of a conjectural science will one day be replaced by another example of the triumph of an inductive philosophy; that the retiring confidence of the public will induce in us a more earnest and successful effort to give them a more definite science; and that, as Professor Smythe says, the "returning spring will no longer renew the honours of the one," whilst it will gradually evolve the development of the other.