MR MILNER STEPHEN. One of the peculiarities of this age, as of all others that have gone before, is the tendency to overlook or under rate the superiority or power that results from patient, unremitting human toil, and to exaggerate that which professedly comes to the individual by a short and' easy road, whether of divine or human origin. This is peculiarly the case in the domain of medicine, where the impos tor, charlatan or quack can often command a belief that is denied to the trained and reputable physician. "We may go further, indeed, and say that, owing to the morbid condition accompanying disease, many people who have no strictly intellectual faith in the nostrums of the quack are still apt to be fascinated by his confident impudence after they have been wearied by the fruitless efforts of the scientific doctor. In this particular line credulity is very nearly as rampant now as it was two centuries ago. The career of imposture which earried Cagliostko and Casanova triumphantly over all Europe in the eighteenth century is still perfectly possible in the nineteenth. The "Egyptian Pills"'"whic,h were so famous in the hands of the arch, quack Cagpliostuo may yet find their counterpart in the advertisements of any modern newspaper, and his " elixirs of immortal youth " and potions for effacing wririkles were only a year or two ago, after the lapse of a• "century and a-half, quite as potent in the hands of MAikiia Rachel.. At the present time we

have trance and spirit - doctors of' various kinds, pill - compounders, herbalists, el hoc genus ovine, aft of whom,, get largely supported, either with belief or without it, in an age when medical science has made enor mous progressive strides, and when its true votaries, armed with the most ample knowledge andlatest appliances, are sent forth to every corner of the world. " Those who have little oi no faith in the abilities of a quack," said Addison, " go to him, either because he is willing to sell health at a reasonable profit, or because the patient, like a drowning man, eatches at every twig, and hopes for relief from the most ignorant, when the most stble physi cians give him none " —a remark which is as applicable now as when Addison wrote it 170 years ago. 