A mere empiric, one that gets what he hath by observation, and makes only nature privy to what he indites; so slow an inventor, that he were better betake himself to his old trade of bricklaying; a bold whoreson, as confident now in making of a book, as he was in times past in laying of a brick.

The boasted, though groundless pretensions of certain illiterate empirics to cure diseases which have eluded the skill and penetration of the faculty, is another absurdity into which people of good common sense have been most woefully entrapped.

The physician, devoted to medical science, and possest of distinguished powers of discerning and removing diseases, is obliged to walk; while a more fortunate empiric, ignorant and worthless, rolls through the streets in his coach.

Like all the advanced thinkers of his profession, he relies, in the art of curing, more on Nature than on drugs; but in thus assisting to dispel the notion that the prescriptions either of the regular doctor or the irregular empiric possess the power to heal, he injures the quack only to aid the good physician.

Such indeed is the infatuation and credulity of the ignorant that, we are confidently assured, a notorious German quack had within one year so many half-guinea applications that he netted £2000; and that the glass bottles in which the precious nostrums were conveyed from the sanctum sanctorum of the mendacious empiric in high Germany, who made his debut in this country by hawking about Dutch drops, amounted to as many two-pences.

It is well that men of lofty genius and pure patriotism should learn, equally with the most shallow empiric or the most self-seeking demagogue, that false steps in politics can rarely be retraced; that concessions once made can seldom, if ever, be recalled, but are usually the stepping-stones to others still more extensive; that what it would have been easy to preserve, it is commonly impossible to repair or to restore.

Many at first cannot endure the sight of a green wound, a sick man, which afterward become good chirurgeons, bold empirics: a horse starts at a rotten post afar off, which coming near he quietly passeth.

New York was then a sound and healthful community; making its mistakes, doubtless, as men ever will err; but the control of things had not yet passed into the hands of sheer political empirics, whose ignorance and quackery were stimulated by the lowest passion for majorities.

One other sovereign remedy I could repeat, an especial antidote against jealousy, an excellent cure, but I am not now disposed to tell it, not that like a covetous empiric I conceal it for any gain, but some other reasons, I am not willing to publish it: if you be very desirous to know it, when I meet you next I will peradventure tell you what it is in your ear.