y and mind for a vigorous and active manhood.
An immense advantage, even from the intellectual point of view, in the
pursuit of medicine and surgery, is that they supply a discipline in
mental heroism. Other professions do this also, but not to the same
degree. The combination of an accurate training in positive science with
the habitual contempt of danger and contemplation of suffering and
death, is the finest possible preparation for noble studies and arduous
discoveries. I ought to add, however, that medical men in the provinces,
when they have not any special enthusiasm for their work, seem
peculiarly liable to the deadening influences of routine, and easily
fall behind their age. The medical periodicals provide the best remedy
for this.

The military and naval professions are too active, and too much bound to
obedience in their activity, for the highest intellectual pursuits; but
their greatest evil in this respect is the continual privation of
solitude, and the frequency of interruption. A soldier's life in the
higher ranks, when there is great responsibility and the necessity for
personal decision, undoubtedly leads to the most brilliant employment of
the mental powers, and develops a manliness of character which is often
of the greatest use in intellectual work; so that a man of science may
find his force augmented, and better under control, for having passed
through a military experience; but the life of barracks and camps is
destructive to continuity of thinking. The incompatibility becomes
strikingly manifest when we reflect how impossible it would have been
for Ney or Massena to do the work of Cuvier or Comte. Cuvier even
declined to accompany the expedition to Egypt, notwithstanding the
prospects of advantage that it offered. The reason he gave for this
refusal was, that he could do more for science in the tranquillity of
the Jardin des Plantes. He was a strict economist of time, and dreaded
the loss of it involved in following an army, even though his mission
would have been purely scientific. How much more would Cuvier have
dreaded the interruptions of a really military existence! It is these
interruptions, and not any want of natural ability, that are the true
explanation of the intellectual poverty which characterizes the military
profession. Of all the liberal professions it is the least studious.

Let me say a word in conclusion about the practical pursuit of the fine
arts. Painters are often remarka