In searching through the early literature of rosin-weed, as related in Chapter XIV I noted that the article in the _Eclectic Medical Review_ recommending rosin-weed for asthma seemed to have been copied only in the southern and western medical journals. I was curious to know if the aristocratic medical editors of the east, the intimates of Bigelow and Holmes and Warren, had deigned to notice a drug of such lowly parentage, discovered by the Indians and indorsed by the medical heretics. I began with the stately row of bound volumes of the Boston _Medical and Surgical Journal_, running back to 1860, that repose on a dusty back shelf of the Library of the New York Academy of Medicine. Looking through the volumes around 1868, when the use of rosin-weed in asthma was being quoted in the south and west, I found many quaint notes and comments, but no mention of rosin-weed. To any physician who has a taste for the history of his art, I would recommend reading a journal of fifty years ago. So many things have been settled that those old physicians puzzled and fought over that it gives one the sense of amusement or lofty detachment of the gods, looking down on struggling, wriggling humanity, yet knowing all the time how it would come out. In those old books I noticed abundant quips and sneers at homoeopathy, now happily taboo in the more courteous journalism of to-day. Besides, they are not so funny now. The doctrine of like-cures-like and the small dose has achieved respectability. When armies all over the world are depending on a minute dose of typhoid poison to prevent and cure typhoid fever, when articles appear in the most respectable medical journals advocating doses of tuberculin so small that they have never been calculated and one-tenth grain doses of calomel instead of the twenty-grain doses of our grandfathers, most of the merry jests have lost their flavor to-day. Rather as I expected, in the _Boston Journal_, I found no notice of the eclectic rosin-weed, but I found something better, a clinical lecture on hay fever by a man after my own heart, who, away back in 1868, had recognized the urticarial nature of the lesion in hay fever. This was a _Clinical Lecture on Spasmodic Coryza or Periodical Asthma_, delivered at the Hôtel Dieu, by Professor Gueneau de Mussy, translated from the _Gazette des Hôpitaux_ by W. F. Munroe, M.D. The lecture runs through several numbers of the _Journal_, beginning in March, 1869, page 125. It should be read by every rhinologist and by every physician who is treating hay fever. When the chemist Woehler, one afternoon in 1828, tried to make up some ammonium cyanate by mixing ammonium sulphate and potassium sulphate and found that he had synthesized urea, one of his colleagues said that he was like Saul, who went out to find his father's asses and found a kingdom. I felt the same way; only, in my case, I went out among the asses and found a king.