I now come to the medical review. After a quantity of remark which has been already disposed of, the writer shows Greek learning, a field in which the old physician would have had a little knowledge. A. B., for the joke's sake, had left untranslated, as being too deep, a remarkably easy sentence of Aristotle, to the effect that what has happened was possible, for if impossible it would not have happened. The reviewer, in "simple astonishment,"--it was simple--at the pretended incapacity--I was told by A. B. that the joke was intended to draw out a reviewer--translates:--He says that this sentence is A. B.'s summing up of the evidence of Spiritualism. Now, being a sort of _alter ego_[347] of A. B., I do declare that he is not such a fool as to rest the evidence of Spiritualism--the _spirit explanation_--upon the occurrence of certain facts proving the possibility of those very facts. In truth, A. B. refuses to receive spiritualism, while he receives the facts: this is the gist of his whole preface, which simply admits spiritualism among the qualified candidates, and does not know what others there may be.
The reviewer speaks of Aristotle as "that clear thinker and concise writer." I strongly suspect that his knowledge of Aristotle was limited to the single sentence which he had translated or got translated. Aristotle is concise in _phrase_, not in book, and is powerful and profound in thought: but no one who knows that his writing, all we have of him, is the very opposite of clear, will pretend to decide that he thought clearly. As his writing, so probably was his thought; and his books are, if not anything but clear, at least anything good but clear. Nobody thinks them clear except a person who always clears difficulties: which I have no doubt was the reviewer's habit; that is, if he ever took the field { 203} at all. The gentleman who read Euclid, all except the As and Bs and the pictures of scratches and scrawls, is the type of a numerous class.
The reviewer finds that the word _amosgepotically_, used by A. B., is utterly mysterious and incomprehensible. He hopes his translation of the bit of Greek will shield him from imputation of ignorance: and thinks the word may be referred to the "obscure dialect" out of which sprung _aneroid_, _kalos geusis sauce_, and _Anaxyridian trousers_. To lump the first two phrases with the third smacks of ignorance in a Greek critic; for [Greek: anaxuridia], _breeches_, would have turned up in the lexicon; and _kalos geusis_, though absurd, is not obscure. And [Greek: amôsgepôs], _somehow or other_, is as easily found as [Greek: anaxuridia]. The word _aneroid_, I admit, has puzzled better scholars than the critic: but never one who knows the unscholarlike way in which words ending in [Greek: eidês] have been rendered. The _aneroid barometer_ does _not_ use a column of air in the same way as the old instrument. Now [Greek: aeroeidês]--properly _like_ the atmosphere--is by scientific non-scholarship rendered having to do with the atmosphere; and [Greek: anaeroeidês]--say _anaëroid_--denies having to do with the atmosphere; a nice thing to say of an instrument which is to measure the weight of the atmosphere. One more absurdity, and we have _aneroid_, and there you are. The critic ends with a declaration that nothing in the book shakes his faith in a _Quarterly_ reviewer who said that suspension of opinion, until further evidence arrives, is justifiable: a strange summing up for an article which insists upon utter rejection being unavoidable.[348] The expressed aim of both A. B. and C. D. was to excite inquiry, and get further evidence: until this is done, neither asks for a verdict.