essarily excluded the literary contributions of living
men, in the shape of editing and commenting; and it is really difficult
to estimate the quantity of valuable matter which is thus deposited in
obscure but still accessible places. A deal of useful work, too, has
been done in the way of translation; and where the book to be dealt with
is an Icelandic saga, a chronicle in Saxon, in Irish Celtic, or even in
old Norman, one may confess to the weakness of letting the original
remain, in some instances, unexamined, and drawing one's information
with confiding gratitude from the translation furnished by the learned
editor.

Let me offer one instance of the important service that may be done by
affording a vehicle for translations. The late Dr Francis Adams, a
village surgeon by profession, was at the same time, from taste and
pursuit, a profound Greek scholar. He was accustomed to read the old
authors on medicine and surgery--a custom too little respected by his
profession, of whom it is the characteristic defect to respect too
absolutely the standard of the day. As a physician, who is an ornament
to his profession and a great scholar, once observed to me, the writings
of the old physicians, even if we reject them from science, may be
perused with profit to the practitioner as a record of the diagnosis of
cases stated by men of acuteness, experience, and accuracy of
observation. Adams had translated from the Greek the works of Paul of
AEgina, the father of obstetric surgery, and printed the first volume. It
was totally unnoticed, for in fact there were no means by which the
village surgeon could get it brought under the notice of the scattered
members of his profession who desired to possess such a book. The
remainder of his labours would have been lost to the world had it not
been taken off his hands by the Sydenham Club, established for the
purpose of reprinting the works of the ancient physicians.

The Roxburghe Club.

Great institutions and small institutions have each individually had a
beginning, though it cannot always be discovered, distance often
obscuring it before it has been thought worth looking after. There is an
ingenious theory abroad, to the effect that every physical impulse, be
it but a wave of a human hand, and that every intellectual impulse,
whether it pass through the mind of a Newton or a brickmaker, goes, with
whatever strength it may possess, into a common store of dynamic
influences, a