all fellow laborers in the same field. Before us lies a boundless
expanse for exploration. There are new conditions of disease to be
learned, new remedies to be discovered, and new properties of old ones
to be examined.

We do not deplore the fact, that there are different schools in
medicine, for this science has not reached perfection, and they tend to
stimulate investigation. The remarks of Herbert Spencer on the
"Multiplication of Schemes of Juvenile Culture," may be pertinently
applied to the different schools in medicine with increased force. He
says: "It is clear that dissent in education results in facilitating
inquiry by the division in labor. Were we in possession of the true
method, divergence from it would, of course, be prejudicial; but the
true method having to be found, the efforts of numerous independent
seekers carrying out their researches in different directions,
constitute a better agency for finding it than any that could be
devised. Each of them struck by some new thought which probably contains
more or less of basis in facts--each of them zealous on behalf of his
plan, fertile in expedients to test its correctness, and untiring in its
efforts to make known its success--each of them merciless in its
criticism on the rest--there cannot fail, by composition of forces, to
be a gradual approximation of all towards the right course. Whatever
portion of the normal method any one of them has discovered, must, by
the constant exhibition of its results, force itself into adoption;
whatever wrong practices he has joined with it must, by repeated
experiment and failure, be exploded. And by this aggregation of truths
and elimination of errors, there must eventually be developed a correct
and complete body of doctrine. Of the three phases through which human
opinion passes--the unanimity of the ignorant, the disagreement of the
inquiring, and the unanimity of the wise--it is manifest that the second