Here is now a parallel case. The above reverend says he will send the recipe free. I directed my student to write for it. The recipe came, with various articles named therein, supposed to be the Latin names of plants. I assert that there are no such medicines in the Materia Medica, or the world. The reverend don’t want that there should be. Why? Because you would not then send to him for his “Compound.”
He sends with his recipe a circular, in which he gives you the history of his marvellous discovery. Further along, by some oversight, he says it was made known to him through a physician!
The names are bogus. The whole remedy is a humbug. There are names in it as species which sound something like some medical term; and the druggist may be deceived thereby. The reverend quack, foreseeing “the difficulty in obtaining the articles in their purity at any druggist’s,” advises you to send to him for them. Do you begin to see the dodge? He “will furnish it at cost.” Only think! How benevolent! “My means make me independent.” Think again. An invalid from boyhood, his time and means exhausted in travelling “in Europe two years,” and was only “sent a missionary (?) through the kindness of friends,” he assures us in his circular. Here he discovered through an old physician—surely a new mode of discovery—this wonderful compound, which cured him in “six weeks,” and forthwith, in gratitude, he proceeded to New York, and began putting up this marvellous remedy “at cost.”
Let us examine the article sold for three dollars and a half a small package. Dr. Hall, of the “Journal of Health,” examined the article which “Old Sands of Life” sold as Canabis Indica, and found the cost “but sixteen cents, bottle and all.” Nevertheless, “The Retired Physician” sold it to his dupes for two dollars. I do not hesitate to say that the above compound cost even less than sixteen cents a package.
“But,” said a gentleman to me, “he is connected with the Bible House. Here is his address: ‘Station D, Bible House, New York.’”
“There is a post-station by that name. Suppose I should give an address, ‘34 Museum Building.’ Would that imply that I was a play-actor, or owner of the Museum?” I replied.
“Then it is only another ‘Reverend’ dodge—is it?” he asked.
“Precisely; it is to give character to his characterless address.”
“Don’t the newspaper publishers know it is a swindle?” he suggested.
“There’s not the least doubt that they know it.”