dexterity, the perfection, the
certainty, which those masters of arts, the bee and the spider, inherit
from Nature.

Book-knowledge, lecture-knowledge, examination-knowledge, are all in the
brain. But work-knowledge is not only in the brain, it is in the senses,
in the muscles, in the ganglia of the sympathetic nerves,--all over the
man, as one may say, as instinct seems diffused through every part of
those lower animals that have no such distinct organ as a brain. See
a skilful surgeon handle a broken limb; see a wise old physician smile
away a case that looks to a novice as if the sexton would soon be sent
for; mark what a large experience has done for those who were fitted
to profit by it, and you will feel convinced that, much as you know,
something is still left for you to learn.

May I venture to contrast youth and experience in medical practice,
something in the way the man painted the lion, that is, the lion under?

The young man knows the rules, but the old man knows-the exceptions. The
young man knows his patient, but the old man knows also his patient's
family, dead and alive, up and down for generations. He can tell
beforehand what diseases their unborn children will be subject to, what
they will die of if they live long enough, and whether they had better
live at all, or remain unrealized possibilities, as belonging to a stock
not worth being perpetuated. The young man feels uneasy if he is
not continually doing something to stir up his patient's internal
arrangements. The old man takes things more quietly, and is much more
willing to let well enough alone: All these superiorities, if such they
are,'you must wait for time to bring you. In the meanwhile (if we will
let the lion be uppermost for a moment), the young man's senses
are quicker than those of his older rival. His education in all the
accessory branches is more recent, and therefore nearer the existing
condition of knowledge. He finds it easier than his seniors to accept
the improvements which every year is bringing forward. New ideas build
their nests in young men's brains. "Revolutions are not made by men in
spectacles," as I once heard it remarked, and the first whispers of
a new truth are not caught by those who begin to feel the need of an
ear-trumpet. Granting all these advantages to the young man, he
ought, nevertheless, to go on improving, on the whole, as a medical
practitioner, with every year, until he has ripened into a well-mellowed