Hocus! pocus! at a loss!
Draw the brazen rod across!
Hocus! pocus! down and up!
Draw them both from foot to top!
Lest you should not have sufficient ingenuity to comprehend the object of Dr Haygarth, in producing these operations on the minds of those paupers, by the aid of such means as he employed, I must try to explain it. It was to induce an inference on the part of the public, that if, by any means whatsoever, effects can be produced on the mind of a poor bedridden patient, whether such effect be favorable or unfavorable (as the latter was often the case in Haygarth’s experiments) ergo, Perkins’s tractors cure diseases by acting on the mind also, whether on a human or brute subject. Should any person be so uncivil and unreasonable as to start the objection to this logic, that with the same propriety all medicines might also be supposed to produce their effects by an action on the mind, I particularly advise (provided such person be a noted coward) that you challenge him or her to a duel: but if, on the contrary, he or she be a terrible Mac Namara-like fellow, modestly reply that it was all a joke, and you hope there was no offence.
O man of mineral putrefaction.
In the famous address to which we have before referred, we find a most remarkable discovery of the hero of our tale, relative to the origin of “stench,” which alone would entitle our doctor to be numbered amongst the most profound of all philosophers, and which we shall give the world in his own words.
“It is too obvious to escape notice, that the stench arising from the hold of a ship proceeds from the putrefaction of substances which belong to all the three kingdoms of nature, vegetable, animal, and mineral!!”