Whilst studying in Germany, Dr. W.J.S. Powers-one of our own I.H.A. members-interviewed many research men of that country. One experimenter was bale to demonstrate material substance in dilutions of colloids as high as the 30th and concluded that not enough is known about high dilutions to fix any limit. Dr. Powers interviewed one of the research-workers in the Eppendorf Hospital in Hamburg. This man was experimenting with the effects of the tissue-salts on paramecium. On these animalculae, he was able to cause effects with succeeding dilutions up to the 12th, above which point they ceased to occur.
After repeating the experiment many times, he one day decided to carry the dilutions a few points higher and was astonished to find that effects appeared again at the 17th dilution and that they continued to occur with each succeeding dilution until he reached somewhere above the 30th, without reaching the limit. But he was working alone and the amount of labor involved in sterilizing receptacles, etc., compelled him to stop while results were still being obtained.
Another approach to the problem of high dilution is furnished by phenomena first discovered by George Starr White of Los Angeles, who claims that, in his boyhood, he observed that carrier-pigeons seem to possess a sense of orientation which enables them to find their way through the air at night. Later, after years of experimenting, he found that a change from facing East-West to a position facing North-South causes a change in the human body and that this alternation in the body can be demonstrated by the alteration in pitch of the sound produced by percussion upon certain parts of the body. Also he noted that the same phenomena occur when drugs and other substances are placed in a metal container and the container and the human body are connected by a length of wire.
Abrams, of San Francisco, learned of these facts through White, and found that he could modify the effects by introducing resistance-coils between the person and the substance which caused the effect, and that the effects occurred in different areas of the body when different resistance-coils were introduced. He also claimed that high dilutions of drugs would cause the effects. He experimented with blood and disease products, and developed a diagnostic symptoms and nomenclature which received a type of publicity that aroused so much opposition from the conservative part of the medical profession, that attention was diverted from the basic discoveries, and, in fact, led to the rejection of his claim that the basic findings were valid.
Around 1920, W.E.Boyd of Glasgow who, under the auspices of the Beit Foundation, was doing research in connection with the nature of the activity in a high dilution, read of Abrams claims. He obtained Abrams diagnostic coils and observed results which convinced him that Abrams was dealing with realities. In 1922, the International Hahnemannian Association, without knowing of Boyds work, appointed a committee to investigate Abrams claims and this committee arrived at the same conclusion that Boyd reached. Both Boyd and the workers of the I.H.A. committee had difficulty in duplicating in duplicating experiments with the coils which Abrams had devised. After a time the I.H.A. investigators dropped the use of Abrams or any other apparatus and continued to experiment with the basic phenomena.
Abrams apparatus was constructed of a series of coils wound for resistance. Boyd, over a period of years, devised an apparatus having a combination of inductance and capacity, which was introduced into the circuit between the subject and the specimen with which he was working. He then introduced elaborate screening and developed a technique which enabled him to control his findings.
Members of the British Air Ministry became interested in certain of Abrams claims but failed of find satisfactory substantiating evidence until they came upon Boyds work. A committee, composed of the members of the Physical Research Department of the War Office, a medical adviser to the Director of Civil Aviation, the head of the Wireless Research Air Ministry, and a member of the Physical Department of the Air Ministry, with Sir Thomas Horder, M.D., chairman, entered into an investigation of Boyds experiments which they continued for more than a year.
The final crucial tests were repeated at two different dates. In one of these tests, two vials were used, exteriorly identical; one containing granules of sugar impregnated with a drop of the ten-thousandth centesimal dilution of Sulphur, and the other containing an equal amount of plain sugar granules. Under strict control, Boyd was able to distinguish between the two vials with a degree of probability of thirty-three million to one an in favour of the physical reality of the phenomena.
This test is mentioned here because of other less competent investigations in which there was failure to obtain evidence convincing to the investigators.
The following two quotations from the committees final report sum up the fact-finding element of their investigation:.
“Certain important experiments were carried out in which homoeopathic drugs happened to be used as test-substances.”.
“Certain substances, when placed in proper relation to the emanometer of Boyd, produced, beyond any reasonable doubt, changes in the abdominal wall of the subject, of a kind which may be detected by percussion.”.
In the meantime, the I.H.A. Committee had continued its investigations until the Foundation for Homoeopathic Research took it over. The Foundations research has been directed to the relationship of the basic phenomena to potentized homoeopathic drugs. Twelve different types of reactions have been confirmed as resulting from the presence of a drug (crude or in high potency) which in a corked vial is brought within a certain distance of an individual. These will be published at another time. Only the report of the Horder Committee will be taken as evidence in this discussion.
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE EVIDENCE.
The experience of prover and of homoeopathic physicians, the experiments with guinea-pigs and fruit-flies, the experiment with colloids, the experiments investigated by the Horder Committee and those of the I.H.A. Committee and of the Foundation for Homoeopathic Research, and the experiments, with paramecium and with tissue-salts, all indicate that certain attributes of drugs remain as a persistent reality in very high dilutions.
But a concept of the electron as being a discrete particle does not admit of this reality.
Our resume of the successive concepts of the essence of matter shows how the inadequacy of each concept to explain advancing knowledge has led to the adoption of each new one. At on time in history have there been so many new discoveries to disturb old concepts. New concepts are superseding old ones so rapidly that a recent editorial was facetiously given the little This Months Atom. In one of the most recent concepts of the atom it is described as an unimaginable structure consisting of a continuous though not a homogeneous medium capable of natural vibrations, these vibrations taking place in a space of more than three dimensions. If this atom be accepted, we can get somewhere with our abstract study of high dilutions, because, as this structure is a continuum, it can be conceived to have the possibility of indefinite expansion.
ENERGY AND MATTER.
The next problem is to find in a grain of salt, a reservoir of energy sufficient to be manifested when the salt has been diluted to the point where it was used in the experiments noted above.
Physics has already indicated an enormous amount of energy locked in an atom in the form of balanced positive and negative forces.
Sir Oliver Lodge estimates that, in a cubic centimetre of matter, there is sufficient energy (if it could be released) to run a forty-million horse-power electric generator for forty million years, day and night, without stopping. Dr. Irving Langmuir in a recent address remarked that, if the negatively charged electrons were not balanced by the positive protons, there would be, in one drop of water, energy as explosive as a million tons of dynamite. We are thus, in our solution of salt and water, dealing with two kinds of unimaginable amounts of energy, one composing water and the other composing salt.
By adding more water to a saturated solution of salt in water, we construct a peculiar kind of lever. Even kitchen has a form with a bent tine which had been used as a lever to remove corks from bottles, but the levers which we have constructed, when making a high dilution, consists of pure force represented by an enormous number of units, the leverage of which can be increased geometrically in successive steps so as to overcome and expand in all directions an opposing force which is also represented by a great number of units.
We can imagine how, with each succeeding dilution, that energy which we know as salt is relentlessly put under enormous tension, expanding uniformly in all directions, its inherent energy constantly resisting the outside pull, like a coiled spring which, the farther it is stretched, the harder it tries to return to its original form; only, in our dilution, we are dealing with an entity which can be infinitely stretched but never pulled apart.
