lie is the only way of preventing a murder, or in which a lie may otherwise save a life. In these cases it is difficult to acquit, and almost impossible to blame; discretion introduced, the line becomes very hard to draw.
I know but one work which has precisely—as at first appears—the character and object of my Budget. It is the Review of the Works of the Royal Society of London, by Sir John Hill, M.D. (1751 and 1780, 4to.) This man offended many: the Royal Society, by his work, the medical profession, by inventing and selling extra-pharmacopœian doses; Garrick, by resenting the rejection of a play. So Garrick wrote:
His farces are physic; his physic a farce is.
I have fired at the Royal Society and at the medical profession, but I have given a wide berth to the drama and its wits; so there is no epigram out against me, as yet. He was very able and very eccentric. Dr. Thomson (Hist. Roy. Soc.) says he has no humour, but Dr. Thomson was a man who never would have discovered humour.
Mr. Weld (Hist. Roy. Soc.) backs Dr. Thomson, but with a remarkable addition. Having followed his predecessor in observing that the Transactions in Martin Folkes's time have an unusual proportion of trifling and puerile papers, he says that Hill's book is a poor attempt at humour, and glaringly exhibits the feelings of a disappointed man. It is probable, he adds, that the points told with some effect on the Society; for shortly after its publication the Transactions possess a much higher scientific value.
I copy an account which I gave elsewhere.
When the Royal Society was founded, the Fellows set to work to prove all things, that they might hold fast that which was good. They bent themselves to the question whether sprats were young herrings. They made a circle of the powder of a unicorn's horn, and set a spider in the middle of it; 'but it immediately ran out.' They tried several times, and the spider 'once made some stay in the powder.' They inquired into Kenelm Digby's sympathetic powder. 'Magnetic cures being discoursed of, Sir Gilbert Talbot promised to communicate what he knew of sympathetical cures; and those members who had any of the powder of sympathy, were desired to bring some of it at the next meeting.'
June 21, 1661, certain gentlemen were appointed 'curators of the proposal of tormenting a man with the sympathetic powder'; I cannot find any record of the result. And so they went on
