ping as
carefully as possible from any sort of allusion to Professor Ellis.
But the fact is, that even human anatomy has now grown to be so large
a matter, that it takes the whole devotion of a man's life to put the
great mass of knowledge upon that subject into such a shape that it
can be teachable to the mind of the ordinary student. What the student
wants in a professor is a man who shall stand between him and the
infinite diversity and variety of human knowledge, and who shall
gather all that together, and extract from it that which is capable
of being assimilated by the mind. That function is a vast and an
important one, and unless, in such subjects as anatomy, a man is
wholly free from other cares, it is almost impossible that he can
perform it thoroughly and well. But if it be hardly possible for a man
to pursue anatomy without actually breaking with his profession, how
is it possible for him to pursue physiology?

I get every year those very elaborate reports of Henle and
Meissner--volumes of, I suppose, 400 pages altogether--and they
consist merely of abstracts of the memoirs and works which have been
written on Anatomy and Physiology--only abstracts of them! How is
a man to keep up his acquaintance with all that is doing in the
physiological world--in a world advancing with enormous strides every
day and every hour--if he has to be distracted with the cares of
practice? You know very well it must be impracticable to do so. Our
men of ability join our medical schools with an eye to the future.
They take the Chairs of Anatomy or of Physiology; and by and by they
leave those Chairs for the more profitable pursuits into which they
have drifted by professional success, and so they become clothed,
and physiology is bare. The result is, that in those schools in which
physiology is thus left to the benevolence, so to speak, of those
who have no time to look to it, the effect of such teaching comes
out obviously, and is made manifest in what I spoke of just now--the
unreality, the bookishness of the knowledge of the taught. And if this
is the case in physiology, still more must it be the case in those
branches of physics which are the foundation of physiology; although
it may be less the case in chemistry, because for an able chemist a
certain honourable and independent career lies in the direction of
his work, and he is able, like the anatomist, to look upon what he
may teach to the student as not absolutely taking h