The efforts, too, which the profession are already making, though, as we humbly consider, not in the right direction, will certainly arrive in time at a path that is more auspicious. When we see the hydropathist looking so much to the skin, homœopathy leading people to think of _quantities_ of medicine; when, in the regular profession, we see one man restricting his views to one organ, another to another, a third thinking that _everything_ can be learnt only by examination of the dead, thus confounding morbid anatomy with pathology—a fourth _restricting_ his labours to the microscope, as if the discovery of laws depended rather on the enlargement of sensual objects than on the improvement of _intellectual_ vision; still we cannot but perceive that these isolated labours, if _once concentrated by unity of purpose and combined action_, would be shadowing forth the outline of a really inductive inquiry. Hydropathy and homœopathy are making powerful uses, too, of the _argumenta ad crumenam_. Their professors are amassing very large sums of money, and that is an influence which will in time probably generate exertions in favour of a more definite science. Still, Medicine and Surgery cannot be formed into a science so long as men consider it impossible; nor can there be any material advance, if they will persist in measuring the remedial processes of nature by their present power of educing them—a presumption obviously infinitely greater than any in which the veriest quack ever dared to indulge. Well did Lord Bacon see the real difficulties of establishing the dominion of an inductive philosophy, when he laboured so much in the first place to destroy the influence of preconceived opinions—idols, as he justly called them. You cannot, of course, write truth on a page already filled with conjecture. Nevertheless, mankind seem gradually exhausting the resources of Error: many of her paths have been trodden, and their misleading lures discovered; and by and by that of Truth will be well-nigh the only one left untried. In the meantime, we fear the science is nearly good enough for the age. The difficulty of advance is founded deeply in the principles of human nature. People know that there are physical laws as well as moral laws, and they may rely on it that disobedience and disease, sin and death, are as indissolubly bound up with infractions of the one as well as the other. It is true there are many who have (however unconsciously) discovered that the pleasures procured by the abuses of our appetites, are a cheat; and that permanent good is only attained by obeying those laws which were clearly made for our happiness.