m, however, most useful and
trustworthy people whenever it becomes requisite to entrust to them
the mixture of commercial and scientific labor which is needed by
heads of boards of weights and measures, of lighthouses, of coast
surveys, and for the affairs and mere business conduct of societies
and colleges or museums. Indeed, as regards this kind of work, they
have too much of it--too much of that sort of labor which in England
is well and wisely done by wealthy aristocrats who are amateurs in
science or eager to find work of some kind. The popular opinion
certainly conceives of the man of true science as being almost unfit
for the practical every-day duties which bring him into working
contact with his fellow-men. This is, as it were, a reversed form of
the prejudice which believes that a physician or a lawyer will be a
worse doctor or advocate because he writes verses or amuses an hour of
leisure by penning a magazine article. As regards medicine, this
popular decree is swiftly fading, though it still has some mischievous
power. It was once believed, at least in this country, that a doctor
should be all his life a doctor, and nothing else: the notion still
lingers, so that young medical men who at the outset of their career
seek to become known as investigators in any of the sciences related
to medicine are, I fear, liable to be looked upon by many older
physicians, and by a part of the lay public, as less likely than
others to attain eminence in the purely practical part of medical
life. It is time that this phantom of vulgar prejudice faded out.
"Whatever you do," said a late teacher of physiology in my presence to
a young doctor, "do not venture to become an experimental
physiologist--that is, if you wish afterward to succeed as a doctor.
It is fatal to that. It is sure to ruin you with the public." Yet
Brodie, Cooper, Erichson and many others so employed their earlier
years of leisure, and I might point in this country to some noble
instances of like success in practice following upon careers which at
first were purely scientific. But, in truth, every physician is more
or less an investigator, and those who have been early trained to the
sternly accurate demands of work in the laboratory of the experimental
physiologist are only the better fitted for study at the bedside.

There is, however, a long list of physicians who have begun life in
the pursuit of science, and have found its charms too potent to allow
the