rofession, in consequence of the necessity
indiscriminately laid upon all for impossible attainments."

I feel therefore impelled to say a very few words in defence of
that system of teaching adopted in our Colleges, by which we wish to
supplement and complete the instruction given by private individuals or
by what are often called Summer Schools.

The reason why we teach so much that is not practical and in itself
useful, is because we find that the easiest way of teaching what is
practical and useful. If we could in any way eliminate all that would
help a man to deal successfully with disease, and teach it by itself
so that it should be as tenaciously rooted in the memory, as easily
summoned when wanted, as fertile in suggestion of related facts, as
satisfactory to the peremptory demands of the intelligence as if taught
in its scientific connections, I think it would be our duty so to teach
the momentous truths of medicine, and to regard all useless additions as
an intrusion on the time which should be otherwise occupied.

But we cannot successfully eliminate and teach by itself that which is
purely practical. The easiest and surest why of acquiring facts is to
learn them in groups, in systems, and systematized knowledge is science.
You can very often carry two facts fastened together more easily than
one by itself, as a housemaid can carry two pails of water with a hoop
more easily than one without it. You can remember a man's face, made
up of many features, better than you can his nose or his mouth or his
eye-brow. Scores of proverbs show you that you can remember two lines
that rhyme better than one without the jingle. The ancients, who knew
the laws of memory, grouped the seven cities that contended for the
honor of being Homer's birthplace in a line thus given by Aulus Gellius:

Smurna, Rodos, Colophon, Salamin, Ios, Argos, Athenai.

I remember, in the earlier political days of Martin Van Buren,
that Colonel Stone, of the "New York Commercial," or one of his
correspondents, said that six towns of New York would claim in the same
way to have been the birth-place of the "Little Magician," as he was
then called; and thus he gave their names, any one of which I should
long ago have forgotten, but which as a group have stuck tight in my
memory from that day to this;

Catskill, Saugerties, Redhook, Kinderhook, Scaghticoke, Schodac.

If the memory gains so much by mere rhythmical association, how much
more will i