nture more boldly. Astruc was sixty-nine years old when he published
his "Conjectures," the first attempt, we are told, to decide the
authorship of the Pentateuch showing anything like a discerning
criticism. Sir Benjamin Brodie was seventy years old before he left
his physiological and surgical studies to indulge in psychological
speculations. The period of pupilage will be busy enough in acquiring
the knowledge needed, and the season of active practice will leave
little leisure for any but professional studies.

Dr. Graves of Dublin, one of the first clinical teachers of our
time, always insisted on his students' beginning at once to visit the
hospital. At the bedside the student must learn to treat disease, and
just as certainly as we spin out and multiply our academic prelections
we shall work in more and more stuffing, more and more rubbish, more and
more irrelevant, useless detail which the student will get rid of just
as soon as he leaves us. Then the next thing will be a new organization,
with an examining board of first-rate practical men, who will ask the
candidate questions that mean business,--who will make him operate if
he is to be a surgeon, and try him at the bedside if he is to be a
physician,--and not puzzle him with scientific conundrums which not more
than one of the questioners could answer himself or ever heard of since
he graduated.

Or these women who are hammering at the gates on which is written "No
admittance for the mothers of mankind," will by and by organize an
institution, which starting from that skilful kind of nursing which
Florence Nightingale taught so well, will work backwards through
anodynes, palliatives, curatives, preventives, until with little show
of science it imparts most of what is most valuable in those branches of
the healing art it professes to teach. When that time comes, the fitness
of women for certain medical duties, which Hecquet advocated in 1708,
which Douglas maintained in 1736, which Dr. John Ware, long the honored
Professor of Theory and Practice in this Institution, upheld within
our own recollection in the face of his own recorded opinion to the
contrary, will very possibly be recognized.

My advice to every teacher less experienced than myself would be,
therefore: Do not fret over the details you have to omit; you probably
teach altogether too many as it is. Individuals may learn a thing
with once hearing it, but the only way of teaching a whole class is by