tenance. We must know-become personally acquainted with diseases-not only with their symptoms, but with themselves; so that by an intimate knowledge of them we may become acquainted with the whole of their cosmical affinities.

The pathology of Paracelsus, we thus see, assumed, on the part of the physician, a power of direct, intuitive knowledge of a disease as a whole; and hence he maintained that the true physician, the man gifted with the power of healing, was, like the poet, born, not made ; that human instruction could do little for such an one, and nothing at all for a man who had no such natural, or rather preternatural gift. This power, however, was to be kept alive and cultivated by the physician's keeping himself responsive to nature; for so long as he was in this relation, he saw and knew a disease at a glance, and he could tell with equal facility and certainty to what plant or mineral this spiritual existence bore the closest resemblance; so that, being similar in kind, but stronger in degree, the one might subdue the other. "Thus," he says, "go the arcana," by which he means the specific antidotes, "against the enemy, as one combatant against another, like two champions ranged one against another; both cold or both hot, both armed with the same weapons, so they engage in their deadly duel. What is this arcanum? Simply the curing power, whatever that is. If the disease be of a mechanical nature, so must the remedy be. What is the arcanum of the stone? We shall not find it in the humours, or in the hot or cold character of the disease, but in the knife. The knife is the arcanum of the stone. What is the arcanum of mania? It is neither coffee nor saliva, but bloodlettting; that is the arcanum of mania. Every disease has its own proper arcanum. That is the thing to be discovered, and diseases should be studied and registered according to their arcana; that is, every disease

of the safety lamp which goes by his name, so far were the speculations of Paracelsus, about the possibility of finding specific antidotes for diseases, removed from the patient research by which Hahnemann realized and put into practical working order the system which now goes by the name of homoeopathy. That Hahnemann achieved what he did is owing to the general advancement of the method of philosophy first proclaimed and explicitly propounded by Lord Bacon. Before the rise of this great luminary, the ghosts of the Middle Ages withdrewsplendid gigantic figures vanishing with the morning mists -receding into the remote regions peopled by the demigods of antiquity. Let Paracelsus pass too. His life was none of the purest, but he had something of the giant nature. He was a prodigal son, but a scion of a royal race.

His Birth-place-Early Education-Novum Organum-Idola, Tribus, Specus,
Fori et Theatri-Truth the Daughter of Time, not of Authority-Science the
History of Nature-Negative Instances-Experimentum Crucis-Pathology and
Therapeutics-Deficiencies in Medicine-Bacon's Feet of Clay.

PARACELSUS died in 1541.

He was

Twenty years after this date, on the 22nd of January, 1561, Francis Bacon was born in a country house in the neighbourhood of London, situated, in fact, between the Thames and the Strand. the son of Sir Nicholas Bacon, keeper of the great seal in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, and of Ann, second daughter of Sir A. Cooke, a lady celebrated for her learning. At the age of seventeen, young Bacon had already, at the University of Cambridge, read and rejected Aristotle, "not for the worthlessness of the author, to

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