ments,
but it begins to shrink from this hour like the Peau de Chagrin of
Balzac's story. Do not worry about it, for all the while there will be
making out for you an ampler and fairer parchment, signed by old Father
Time himself as President of that great University in which experience is
the one perpetual and all-sufficient professor.

Your present plethora of acquirements will soon cure itself. Knowledge
that is not wanted dies out like the eyes of the fishes of the Mammoth
Cave. When you come to handle life and death as your daily business,
your memory will of itself bid good-by to such inmates as the well-known
foramina of the sphenoid bone and the familiar oxides of
methyl-ethylamyl-phenyl-ammonium. Be thankful that you have once known
them, and remember that even the learned ignorance of a nomenclature is
something to have mastered, and may furnish pegs to hang facts upon which
would otherwise have strewed the floor of memory in loose disorder.

But your education has, after all, been very largely practical. You have
studied medicine and surgery, not chiefly in books, but at the bedside
and in the operating amphitheatre. It is the special advantage of large
cities that they afford the opportunity of seeing a great deal of disease
in a short space of time, and of seeing many cases of the same kind of
disease brought together. Let us not be unjust to the claims of the
schools remote from the larger centres of population. Who among us has
taught better than Nathan Smith, better than Elisha Bartlett? who teaches
better than some of our living contemporaries who divide their time
between city and country schools? I am afraid we do not always do
justice to our country brethren, whose merits are less conspicuously
exhibited than those of the great city physicians and surgeons, such
especially as have charge of large hospitals. There are modest
practitioners living in remote rural districts who are gifted by nature
with such sagacity and wisdom, trained so well in what is most essential
to the practice of their art, taught so thoroughly by varied experience,
forced to such manly self-reliance by their comparative isolation, that,
from converse with them alone, from riding with them on their long rounds
as they pass from village to village, from talking over cases with them,
putting up their prescriptions, watching their expedients, listening to
their cautions, marking the event of their predictions, hearing them tell
of