it will be seen that the number, to March last, will have exceeded one million five hundred thousand!" It is not surprising that with such "facts" behind them the tractors attracted deep and wide attention. A contemporary tells of it and the fate of the inventor: A gentleman in Virginia sold a plantation and took the pay for it in tractors. Nothing was more common than to sell horses and carriages to buy them. But the worst (or the best) of it was, yellow fever was raging in New York, and Perkins thought he could cure the fever with the tractors and fell a victim to the fever himself. Success of Quackery.--Always in the history of quackery and, indeed, in the history of all therapeutics, the appeal is to the cures that have been effected. This is the only evidence, of course, that can be adduced for the development of therapeutics, and yet the history of medicine makes it clear how carefully supposed cures must be analyzed if they are really to mean anything. Mesmer could adduce thousands of cured cases. Perkins could do the same. Every quack in history, from Galen's weaver, who became a leech, down to the last street corner nostrum vendor, does the same thing. When on the strength of supposed cures, then, a new system of therapeutics is introduced, it is much more likely than not that there is no foundation for the claims made. We have had ever so many more experiences of disappointment after the introduction of remedies which cured at the beginning of their history, than we have had of remedies that maintain themselves after prolonged experience. It is the attitude of scepticism and suspended judgment until after a remedy or method of treatment has been tried on many different kinds of cases in varying circumstances that constitutes the only efficient safeguard against repeating the unfortunate errors of old times in the matter of drugs and remedial measures. If the public could be made to realize this, they would be much less easily taken in. What the quacks cure are not always imaginary ills, but often ills that are very real, at least to the patients, and the symptoms of which are relieved by the confidence aroused in the new remedy and the representations of the supposed discoverer, who, in spite of the exaggerated claims which he makes, somehow succeeds in catching the trust of patients. Very often this process initiated by the quack is really only the beginning of the cure.