excluded because of their inertness. In tropical countries, where a fervid sun, a humid air, and a teeming soil give extraordinary energy to vegetable life, the natives of those regions often recognise the existence of potent herbs unknown to the European practitioner. No doubt such virtues are often as fabulous and imaginary as those of indigenous plants long since rejected by the sagacity of European practice. But we are not altogether to despise the experience of nations less advanced in knowledge than ourselves, or to suppose, because they may ascribe imaginary virtues to some of their officinal substances, as has been abundantly done by ourselves in former days, that therefore the remedial properties of the plants are not worthy of serious investigation or that their medical knowledge is beneath our notice because they are unacquainted with the terms of modern science. It is not much above 20 years since an English officer in India was cured of gonorrhoea by his native servant, after the skill of regular European practitioners had been exhausted. The remedy employed was Cubebs, the importance of which was previously unknown, and the rationale of whose action is to this day beyond the discovery of physiologists. It is of undoubted value in urethral catarrh : and who shall say that there are not hundreds of equally powerful remedies still remaining to be discovered. * * * and it must be sufficiently apparent to all unprejudiced minds, that the resources of the vegetable kingdom, far from being exhausted, have hardly yet been called into existence. It is presumptuous for the theorist to assert that he already possesses a remedy for all the maladies that flesh is heir to ; it is mere idleness in the routine practitioner, carried away by the attraction of spacious generalities, to fancy that one tonic is as good as another tonic, or one purgative as another purgative. In reality the true cause of the different actions of medicines upon the human body is admitted by the highest authorities to be wholly unknown ; and surely this is in itself the best of all reasons why we should not assume that we already possess against disease all the remedies which nature affords; on the contrary it should stimulate us to reiterated enquiries into the peculiar action of new remedial agents. * * * "And they (i.e., European practitioners) find the medicines which are powerful in Europe, comparatively inactive in other climates. The heat of a country, its humidity, particular localities, food, and the social habits of a people will predispose them to varieties of disease for which the drugs of Europe offer no sufficient remedy, and will render that which is relied upon in one country unworthy of dependence in another. Thus the Cinchona bark of Peru, important as it is in Europe, is, we are told, rejected by the people among whom it grows, because it is found too stimulating and heating for their excitable constitutions. And speaking of Ipecacuanha, Dr. Von Maritus, who so carefully examined practically the Materia Medica of Brazil, asserts "nullumest dubium quin Emetica in terris zonne fervidae subjects effectus producent multo magis salutares quam in regionibus frigidioribus."
"This last observation seems to indicate, that if emetic plants are so much more common in hot than cold countries, it is because there is so much greater a necessity for them. The late Mr. Burnett, and many other persons, have asserted that every country spontaneously furnishes remedies for those maladies which the people of the soil are naturally subject to, and that the
