o cure his dog of mange, for which it had been treated without success by many veterinary surgeons. In six weeks the dog was cured, and Whately became a homoeopath and remained one to the end of his life.

It is, however, childish to talk of homoeopathic cures being worked by faith. People, never having studied the question, do not believe in homoeopaths. They only go tohem after trying everything else. Such persons are then more difficult to cure, not only because the disease is of onger standing, but also because the constant absorption of large doses of allopathic drugs (which are all poisons to the human body) has altered the construction of the tissues of the body, which has been obliged to adapt itself as well as it can (Darwin's law) so as to cope with the unnatural poisons which have been administered. First, the accumulated effects of these poisons have to be rectified, and secondly, the cure of the disease has to be undertaken.

Moreover, a person who goes to a homoeopath is in a sceptical frame of mind, not only of the efficacy of Homœopathy, but also on account of his past failures to obtain relief. Would not you yourself go to a homoeopath in a sceptical, half apologetic mood? Then why attribute the cures to faith? Rather they are cures in spite of the patient. Certainly confidence, once established, is a great help to cure, but an allopath also likes to create confidence in his patients.

Just a few closing words. I apologize to the science of Homoeopathy for my lack of knowledge in dealing with this technical subject, and I would not have attempted to do so were it not for the fact that homoeopathic doctors are unable to obtain a fair hearing, while I must be considered independent and unbiased, since I am not professional, and I believed in Allopathy for thirty-three years. It all looked so simple and correct. For instance, a person was constipated, and the doctor gave him a pill, and immediately the constipation was cured! This will not stand examination. What happens is that the pill is poisonous to the system and sets up a violent irritation, which causes a diarrhoea to eject this poison. When the poison is expelled, the constipation returns in nine cases out of ten. You can draw your own conclusions as to whether this is either scientific or natural.

or if

If

you have any difficulty in following the various points, you detect errors in my remarks, you can easily discover the truth by making inquiries from a qualified homoeopath. My special object in writing is for wounded and invalid

soldiers, and my second is for humanity in general. One day the good sense of the British nation and the fair play of Parliament will insist on a Commission to investi gate this great truth, but the country is, perhaps, not yet ready to accept facts which tend to upset all preconceived ideas. But such a Commission is inevitable in the near future. All I ask you to-day is to try and get out of the rut and think a little for yourself, and do not remain steeped in the idea that because a doctor is a homoeopath he is necessarily less versed in anatomy, pathology or bacteriology than an allopath. Heaven has rounded us and averaged us up pretty well, and there is not much to choose between the average intelligence of two similar classes, however you may be invited to believe the contrary. All homoeopathic doctors hold allopathic degrees.

I hope nobody will read into my words that I disparage the work of allopaths. Their surgery frequently borders on the marvellous. The allopaths' technical knowledge is very excellent, and their correct analyses of morbid conditions, their diagnoses and prognoses, are extraordinarily accurate and clever, but their capacity to cure chronic disease is admitted by themselves to be slight, although they can generally alleviate the symptoms. The truth of this may be ascertained by looking round you. Some people are suffering from chronic indigestion, others from asthma, rheumatism, piles, varicose veins, chronic constipation, neuritis, and a hundred other chronic ailments, for which they have been skilfully treated for years without eradi cation. That there is a great lack of efficacy in medicine. (as distinct from surgery, hygiene, nursing, diet, sanitation, prophylaxis, etc.) was naïvely admitted at the Medical Conference recently held in connection with the experiences of the war. I quote from the discussion on influenza, as it appeared in the leading papers: "Scorn was poured over the number of infallible cures by Dr. W. J. Tyson, a civilian doctor from Folkestone, who drew the loudest cheers of the day for the statement that there is only one cure when a temperature occurs, go to bed at once and stop there. The Chairman (Colonel Haven Emerson, of the Medical Department of the United States Army) then convulsed the meeting with the dry remark: reached unanimity for the first time.'"

'We have

Additional proof was afforded a short time ago by Sir George Newman, Chief Medical Officer of the newly con stituted Ministry of Health. In a memorandum drawn up by him, it was stated that upwards of 270,000 years per

annum are lost in England and Wales through unemployment from invalidity or disablement, while nearly half a million persons under the age of fifty years die every year, and that during the war a million recruits were found to be unfit for effective enlistment.

Is it not then obligatory on the leaders of public opinion, the Press, to leave no stone unturned scientifically to establish the true law of cure? At present the medical profession give drugs empirically and without solid basis on a natural law. It is the only scientific profession which does so. Chemists, engineers, geologists, breeders of cattle, astronomers, etc., all endeavour to ascertain and work on the foundation of natural laws. The only natural law for cure yet expounded is "Similia similibus curantur, but, while pouring contumely on its author, the medical profession have neither proved that the law is incorrect nor have they ever made public the true law governing the cure of disease. Perhaps the Minister of Public Health will remedy this state of affairs, but probably in the first instance courageous newspapers which do not shrink from the truth will have to start the investigation.

C. F. MACKENZIE

Went up in the le came down in a

The above represents the average globe-trotter's view m of the little island that lies on the route of the big liners to South Africa and South America. To the stay-at-home Madeira suggests wine, a particularly insipid sort of cakes and, possibly, as an afterthought, tuberculosis.

The traveller would hesitate to say that he knew London if he had only once been to the White City, or Belgium if i his knowledge of that country was limited to a visit to the Brussels Exhibition; yet I have heard Madeira denounced as a land of beggars and bad wine on the strength of no better acquaintance than the conventional excursion to the Mount Palace Hotel, train, breakfast and runningcarro included in the charge of £1 a head, arranged by a kindly steamship company that desires nothing more than to get rid of all its passengers for an hour or two while the ship coals.

Funchal-notice, I do not say Madeira-is well known to that fortunate section of the community that is able to flee from the grey skies and treacherous winds of our own country to bask in the midwinter sunshine of a Southern land. Only a small proportion of these ever leave the environs of the city, except to dash along the specially made roads in motors to Machico or towards the Grand Curral. Funchal, like all capitals, is more or less a cosmopolitan city, and you cannot get to know Madeira by merely visiting Funchal.

Those interested may be surprised to learn that within a voyage of three and a half days from Southampton they may obtain experiences and adventures unlike any that they could meet with in any other part of the world. The island of Madeira contains, on the north and west, regions almost unexplored by Europeans, and much of this may be visited by means of levada-walking.

Levadas are narrow canals cut out of the solid rock of volcanic basalt of which the island consists: watercourses of masonry, which intersect Madeira like a network, for the purposes of irrigation. It must not be forgotten that Madeira is a mountainous country, a land of peaks and hollows, deep mountain gorges and beetling sea-cliffs. The rivers-of

hich three, Sao Joao, Santa Luzia and Joao Gomes flow ut within the precincts of Funchal-are nothing more than ry, rocky beds for the greater part of the year, rolling, oaming mountain torrents in the rainy season. Were it not or these levadas or watercourses, the lower regions would e without water for most of the year, vegetation would anish and Madeira, instead of being, as she is, a land of lowers, would be a land of barren desolation.

Ascending the levada most easily accessible from Funchal, hat of Santa Luzia, one cannot but be struck with the harvellous skill of the engineers who designed and carried ut the work of construction. By the side of the running water is a narrow path of solid masonry about eighteen nches wide, practically the same width as the levada itself. It needs a good head to walk along this path, which is at some points only a few inches above the slope of the mountain, hough at others there is a sheer drop of fifty feet or so. As you ascend the levada, though the gradient is so slight that the path will seem to you almost level, the swirling, eddying water will be all the while on your right on the other side of it, the mountain rises perpendicularly for hundreds of feet. The brown surface is bare in patches, but for the most part it is clothed with ferns, grasses, shrubs, and near the skyline, wherever the soil is deep enough, fir-trees. Below you, on your left hand, at varying depths, lies the bed of the river.

The Santa Luzia levada is tame in comparison with the others, but it will serve for an afternoon's walk from Funchal. It also gives some idea of what is to be expected from the more-distant and dangerous levadas. If you can manage it without any feeling of giddiness and without watching your step every moment, above all if you are surefooted enough to enjoy the glimpses around you of here a little nook filled with maidenhair fern, there a dripping patch of spongy moss, yonder a miniature cornfield of a size sufficient to supply the wants of the inhabitants of a dolls' house, then and only then it will be time enough to attempt one of the more hazardous levada walks.

Although the interior of Madeira is unknown to the majority of Europeans, it must not be imagined that vast wastes of unpopulated land will be found. One may walk for days along the remote levadas and never get out of sight of signs of man. As one penetrates farther into the mountain ravine along the Santa Luzia levada, for instance, one does not get, as we should say at home, farther into the country. As on the outskirts of the city itself, plantation.