But alas! the logical system of Doctor Cooke, like many other beautiful and well-laid superstructures, failed in this essential thing--_the foundation on which it was raised was not true_. Logical minds too often willingly lay down or accept assumptions, or uncertain facts, as axioms, and are satisfied if the deductions from these are logically accurate and perfect. Doctor Cooke, in a slow and laborious way, took infinite pains to build up his logical superstructure. The writer recollects his illustration of logical connections, by means of certain pieces of wood united by strings; and, notwithstanding his unadorned style and slow and hesitating manner, his students--carried away by his well-known truthfulness, sincerity, and earnest zeal, and incapable of judging for themselves of the validity of his premises--accepted his doctrine as a new revelation and were almost unanimously his ardent followers until experience or more ample knowledge opened their eyes to its faults. Before he removed from Transylvania School to the new one in Louisville in 1837, severe criticisms of his teachings had been published. Indeed it had begun to be believed by some that these teachings were marring the prosperity of that old college. Soon after his removal to Louisville, we are told by Doctor Yandell, "the current which from the first had set in against his theory and practice grew every year more formidable" until "assailed on all sides, and from within as well as from without, his theory steadily lost ground, his practice grew more unpopular and his influence as a teacher visibly declined from the day he began to lecture in Louisville."[53] So that in 1843 he was, on petition of the students, retired on a three years' pension of two thousand dollars per annum. Besides the two volumes of his _Pathology and Therapeutics_ he published a small work on _Autumnal Diseases_, and a number of medical papers in _The Transylvania Journal of Medicine_, of which he was one of the original editors. The congestive theory of disease had its short day, like many others which have floated like bubbles on the stream of medical progress. We remember it as one of the curiosities of medical literature.[54] DOCTOR CHARLES WILKINS SHORT Was born in Woodford County, Kentucky, at "Greenfields," October 6, 1794. He connected himself with the Medical Department of Transylvania University in 1825. He had been called by the Trustees in a previous year to the chair of Materia Medica and Medical Botany, but did not at once accept. Doctor Short was a most upright, conscientious, modest, undemonstrative gentleman of great delicacy of feeling. He was a most zealous and industrious botanist, and was possessed of artistic tastes and ability.