same business for twenty or thirty years. And if the goldsmith decides that the substance in question is gold, he will not be likely to throw it away on his way home because the first boy he meets tells him it is nothing but mica. If one has a suspected bill, he goes directly to the bank, or some professed expert. But men will not always exercise the same common sense in questions that relate to their life or health; they often shut their eyes, and stop their ears, against every legitimate source of information; will be guided only by their own morbid curiosity, or listen to the advice of the most incompetent. An individual in whose general integrity they have no confidence, and whose opinion or word in any other matter is not considered worth a straw, is often taken as a guide in some deeply important medical question, without any misgivings. When we look around and see what ravages quackery in its multiplied and continually multiplying forms is making among all classes, we are almost ready to conclude that this is an age of extraordinary delusion, and that quackery never ran thus rampant before; but if
