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With respect to the fallacies to which such analogies are exposed, I shall hereafter speak at some length, and examine the pretensions of those ultra chemists of the present day who have upon every occasion arraigned, at their self-constituted tribunal, the propriety of our medicinal combinations, and the validity of our national pharmacopœias.

In addition to the obstacles already enumerated, the progress of our knowledge respecting the virtues of medicines has met with others of a moral character, which have deprived us in a great degree of another obvious method of research, and rendered our dependance upon testimony uncertain, and often entirely fallacious. The human understanding, as Lord Bacon justly remarks, is not a mere faculty of apprehension, but is affected, more or less, by the will and the passions; what man wishes to be true, that he too easily believes to be so, and I conceive that physic has, of all the sciences, the least pretensions to proclaim itself independent of the empire of the passions.