strong perspiration, and decided scrofulous look. It is well known that milk presents different characters, according to the time when drawn from the breast, at first thin, at last when the breast is nearly empty, becoming thick and rich. This is owing to the quantity of the fluid constituents, which rush on through the ducts, washing the globules along, and leaving the breast first. This "rushing in of the milk," as it is termed by women, is a very remarkable phenomenon; it is described as a "prickling," or a kind of "rapid straining of fluid through a fine sieve." It is well known that the secretion of milk is very easily affected by mental emotions; sudden grief or excessive anger may cause an entire suppression, or the crying of the infant may seem to suddenly promote it. Children will often nibble at the nipple till the rushing in" makes nursing easy. Henle, in his "Handbuch der Anatomie," says "the rushing in of the milk is due to a sudden congestive increase of the secretion." This statement is certainly true, but very vague and susceptible of a more definite explanation, namely, that there is an actual filtration of the fluid constituents from the blood. The milk ducts were already filled and crowded with corpuscles, that had increased constantly, and rapidly, since the previous nursing, these corpuscles will not leave the ducts, except when washed along by the current every where rushing in from the surrounding capillaries. This rushing in may be very gradual, and not instantaneous, distending the gland slowly and almost imperceptibly.

In conclusion, I would say that this article has been prepared with full knowledge of its incompleteness, but with the desire that it may elicit observations, pro or con, in this too much neglected field of scientific inquiry.

Explanation of Figures.

Figure 1 represents a section of the milk ducts, where dilated, of a nursing woman, showing the epithelial cells lining the walls, and also these detached cells occupying and partly filling the caliber of these ducts. Taken from Henle's "Handbuch der Anatomie; Eingeweidelehre."

Figure 2 represents the mannuary secretion of a woman in the ninth month of pregnancy, showing some colostrum corpuscles, and by accident a large epidermic scale from the nipple.

Figure 3 represents magnified colostrum corpuscles.

Figure 4 represents an exceedingly degenerate specimen of

milk, from a scrofulous nurse; and contains some colostrum corpuscles.

Figure 5 represents perfectly good milk; the average size of the globules large, averaging of an inch in diameter.

Figure 6 represents good milk, but not in a state of rapid development; the average size of the globules is less than in number 5, being ʊʊ of an inch.

Figure 7 represents very poor thin milk.

Figure 8 represents the appearance of a drop of milk after the addition of acetic acid, which dissolves the cell wall, and allows the fat globules to run together.

ARTICLE LXXVII.

A Brief History of the Homoeopathic Materia Medica. By SAMUEL BANCROFT BARLOW, M. D., Professor of Materia Medica and Therapeutics in the New York Homœopathic Medical College.

The Homœopathic Materia Medica now stands before the world peerless; the noblest monument of human perseverance and discriminative skill which has been permitted to cheer the heart of man hitherto having for its sole and only object the good, the highest, holiest good of mortals. It may well lay most righteous claim to the highest commendation (adoration ?) of the race, and challenge almost an equality of bounteous thanksgiving from mankind, which has hitherto been awarded to the system of healing designed to elevate man from the ruin and degradation of moral delinquency, and place him on a plane "a little lower than the angels." Being yet in its infancy, and measuring its existence by a few decades of years—a period only equal to the common allotment of human life-it has already attained a growth, a perfection, and a usefulness which might put to shame the votaries and advocates, the panegyrists and apologists of its myriad-yeared brethren of other schools, which are but the shapeless, arbitrary, ill-assorted, and cumbrous accumulations of many centuries; while this, in all its useful freshness and growing vigor, based on a law of Nature as old as Nature herself, and as lasting as the Almighty Author of Nature's laws, can, with all propriety, boast of a symmetry and power for good in its growing perfections and in its adaptation for the relief of suffering humanity, which would be but the display of mockery and absurdity, when predicated of any other system or collection of the apparatus of the healing art.

Already can it display, with well-earned merit, an apparatus medicaminum, which, founded, as it is, on an unswerving and unalterable law of the universe of matter; which can lay just claim to immortality, and which time, which ever has and ever will displace other arbitrary systems, will never be able to abrogate or

overturn.

It is based deep down upon such everlasting foundations as gives it a claim to remain as long as time and the existence of man and disease-as the manifestation of violated laws of health shall be found upon the earth, and shall usher in the glad day when man and earth, rejuvenated, shall banish pain, sickness, and death from this fair heritage of God.

In 1786, Samuel Hahnemann, a true seer, discovered the connection between the pathopoietic and the therapeutic action of drugs upon the human body, and thus laid the foundation of a method of curing disease as simple and as efficacious as it is safe, pleasant, and beneficent; for the first time, in the lengthened roll of centuries, replacing the old, insecure, and often dangerous and hurtful Galenic method by one whose beneficence, safety, and efficacy will ever be the theme of praise of mankind, and whose dangers man will never record, for the reason that they will never be discovered.

In 1790, Hahnemann first promulgated to the world the truth of the discovery he had made in 1786. As a result of this publication by the master physician of the eighteenth century, the world of medicine was moved to its centre; the good were struck with awe and admiration, the bad with astonishment, culminating in opposition, detraction, persecution and revenge.

The good man was unmoved bp the clamors and persecution of his less humane and amiable brethren, but went forward by the command of a divinity within him, enlarging his views, perfecting his beneficent improvements, calling and electing his friends, converts and collaborateurs in the the noble enterprise of disenthralling his race from the shackles of a tyranny which had held the medical world in uninterrupted and almost unquestioned sway for twenty-five centuries; himself unmindful of toil, of suffering, of opposition, of calumny and of ignominy at the hands of his professional brethren, if so he might press forward to the finishing of his task, which was to render his name immortal as one of mankind's greatest benefactors, and which was to eventuate in the disarming of all the most dreaded and fatal diseases of half their

malignity and terror in his own day; and finally to prepare mankind for an earthly life measurably devoid of disease and suffering.

In all these labors of love, the noble band of friends who clung around him, converts to his doctrines, and whom he had electrified with the holy fire of his genius, were greatly useful in carrying forward the provings of drugs upon the healthy; and the names of Boënninghausen, Stapf, Noack, Trinks, Hartman, Rückert, Hering, Kurtz, Haynel, Roth, Schroën, Attomyr, Mueller, Mayerhofer, Griessclick, Gross, and many others, will go down to an immortality in praise, while their provings to this day stand as monuments of their perseverance, and furnishing models of perfection which have not, as yet, and peradventure never will be, surpassed in excellence.

In 1801, Hahnemann published a work on the efficacy of small doses of medicine, and of belladonna in particular. The minute dose of the truly homoeopathic drug is a necessary and imperative corollary of the fact that like cures like, and that the sick organism has its susceptibilities enormously exalted as toward all agencies and instrumentalities possessing the attribute of similarity to the morbific cause.

The question of the dose can never be settled by dogmatism, even in its profoundest and purest formal utterances, so long as a multitude of causes are existent and operative in human bodies, rendering some more, and others less susceptible to drug action. Those causes and their resultant differences, call them constitutional, idiosyncratic, or by whatever other name you please, will and must remain so long as time lasts, and man remains a nidus for the existence of either transient or permanent miasmata, of a personal, or of a more general origin.

We can never too much admire the acuteness of Hahnemann's genius, who lead him thus early, and as it were at the very initiatory period of his greatest of all medical discoveries, to apprehend the corollary of the smallest doses being able to cure diseases.

In 1805 he published a tractate of a "new system of medicine,” based upon pure experience; and about the same time another and very learned disquisition upon the utter, palpable and fundamental, or radical insufficiency of all precedent systems.

These two last named publications were written with a force and power utterly unanswerable. They were, really, mighty helps in preparing the public mind of European communities for the reception of a system, which he had now began to see was destined

in time to revolutionize the world of medicine and ultimately to become universal.

This same year, 1805, was signalized as an era in Hahnemann's life by the publication, at Leipzic, of his "Fragmenta de viribus medicamentorum positivis sive in sano corpore humano observatis." This may be called the first work really pertaining to a new and truly rational materia medica, which the world had then been permitted to see. It was a most worthy commencement of a work, which now, however much sneered at and derided by interested bigots and charlatanic knaves, stands a monument worthy of the admiration, the honors and the suffrages of the scientific world.

In 1810, Hahnemann gave to the world his "New Organon of the Healing Art," the very grammar of rational medicine; a gospel of the healing art, which the sophistry and the malice of all the opposers of homoeopathy have never been able to invalidate, or even to loosen one stone of its foundation.

The great work, the immortal conception of a gigantic mind, was now to be ushered in for the benefit of earth's millions in all future ages. I alluded, of course, to the Materia Medica Pura of Hahnemann, in six volumes; the publication of which was commenced in 1811, and completed in 1820. Incomplete in its first issue of course, from the provings (probata) which were to complement its deficiencies were still being carried on by Hahnemann and his co-workers, both in the profession and among the laity. Yet even in its pristine condition it evinced a skill and order of arrangement, which, imperfect as it was, yet filled and satisfied the demands of science urged in favor of the new and improved methodus medendi.

The Vienna provers executed some really able scientific work in the way of provings of new drugs and reprovings of old ones, some of which were truly exhaustive and which will stand as models for all future time, and will ever be looked upon as monuments of the skill, perseverance and self-devotion of those earnest, true men and disciples of the great master. Their labors were recorded in Staff's "Archiv," and I believe from 1822 to 1840, or later, a proving of thuja, done by the Viennese workers, was a truly herculean work, which developed powers and capabilities in that drug, which the heart of man could never before have conceived of. All honor to these glorious creators of medical knowledge, the elements of which had lain hidden from the foundation of the world!