[25] In fact, many men who pursue such trades, notably butchers, are genuinely humane, and do their best to get through their work in the most merciful way. Several of them have recently expressed warm satisfaction on obtaining Baxter’s mask, whereby oxen may be instantaneously killed without the chance of a misdirected blow. The mask is to be obtained from Mr. Baxter, Ealing Dean, W. SACRIFICIAL MEDICINE. The world has done wrong to laugh at the old lady who reproved her sailor grandson for “telling her such a scandalous fib as that he had seen a fish fly in the air,” but restored her confidence to the hopeful youth when he proceeded to narrate how he had picked up a wheel of Pharaoh’s chariot on the Red Sea shore. Practically, we all jump easily at beliefs toward the level of which we have already climbed by previous knowledge (or previous prejudice, as it may chance), and refuse, donkey-wise, to budge an inch toward those which happen to be on a plane above our preconceived notions of what either is or ought to be. It is this propensity, of course, which makes the most baseless calumny mischievous by paving the way for the next slander against its object. And it is it, also, which grants interminable leases of life to false systems of physics and religion by securing a welcome for every fiction and fallacy which at any time may seem to favor them, and closing the door in the face of truths which militate against and might explode them. A curious study of the “Grammar of Assent,” as used by the majority of mankind in the matter which comes nearest to their own business and bosoms, might, I think, be made by unearthing the preconceived notions and preparatory ideas which must needs exist as regards the healing art, and which can have enabled doctors confidently to prescribe, and patients meekly to accept, the horrid and shocking remedies in use from the earliest period,--remedies of which it is a mild criticism to say that they were worse than the diseases they professed to cure. Had the minds of men concerned with medical inquiries been really free from antecedent convictions,--blank sheets of paper whereon Nature could have written down her facts, which experience might have read and collated,--it is clear enough that good diet, exercise, and cleanliness, and the occasional use of simple preparations of herbs, would early have constituted the primitive and sound rules of medical science, to be supplemented, as time went on, by discoveries of the therapeutic value of more rare vegetable substances and of a few minerals. Never could practical observation, by any possibility, have suggested that it would be beneficial to a sick man to make him swallow potable gold or powdered skulls, or a bolus of decomposed old toads and earth-worms. The _un-_“scientific use of the imagination” can alone have dictated these and scores of no less absurd and obnoxious prescriptions, prompted by some _a priori_ theory of what _ought_,