But Lord Bacon has assigned an amply sufficient reason for these circumstances. In another place, he says, “Medicine is a science which hath been, as we have said, more professed than laboured, and yet more laboured than advanced, this labour having been in my judgment, rather in circle than in progression. For I find much iteration, but small addition.” Now it is, in reality, this profession without labour, this labour without advancement, so well expressed by Lord Bacon, this iteration without addition, which is the real and sufficient cause (overlooked by him) of the poets so properly making Æsculapius and Circe, brother and sister, and of the world uniformly placing witches, old women and impostors in competition with physicians. And again his lordship, with equal justice, says, “in the inquiry of diseases, they do abandon the cures of many, some as in their nature incurable, and others as past the period of cure; so that Sylla and the triumvirs never proscribed so many men to die, as they do by their ignorant edicts, whereof numbers do escape with more difficulty, than they did in the Roman proscriptions. Therefore I will not doubt to note as a deficience, that they inquire not the perfect cures of many diseases, but, pronouncing them incurable, do enact a law of neglect and exempt ignorance from discredit.” It therefore becomes proper to ascend to the cause of the little success which has hitherto attended medical investigation, and to attempt, by the removal of that cause, to accelerate its progress, and, by increasing the success, to increase the respectability of the art. * * * * * The grand cause which has hitherto retarded the progress of medicine, has been the total want of a general principle, and this want has arisen from the very low state of physiological theory. It has ever appeared to me that a sufficient distinction has not been made between diseases as affecting various functions, which to the most superficial observer seem to be very different in their nature. It would appear, at first sight, that, instead of almost uniformly applying mental remedies to mental diseases, the physician not only does not distinguish what stages and parts of the same disease are mechanical, what vital and what intellectual, which must uniformly be the case where all the functions are involved, but that he does clearly perceive such a distinction at all to subsist in any form or combination of disease. The physician has also failed to attend to a correct arrangement of the various articles of the materia medica, which ought not to be considered merely as stimulant, sedative, &c. but as in reality operating upon different functions.