be for your own ears, to-night at least.

_Mr. Lincoln (rising)._ We will withdraw to the library. Gentlemen, pray
come to some understanding during our absence respecting the reply to be
sent to M. Thouvenel's extraordinary secret dispatch. I will rejoin you
in--

_Gen, McC._ Seven minutes, Mr. President--those are all I can spare.
Good evening, gentlemen.

* * * * *

LITERARY NOTICES.

BORDER LINES OF KNOWLEDGE IN SOME PROVINCES OF MEDICAL SCIENCE. An
Introductory Lecture delivered before the Medical Class of Harvard
University, Nov. 6, 1861. By Oliver Wendell Holmes, M.D., Parkman
Professor of Anatomy and Physiology. Boston: Ticknor & Fields. 1861.

It is a pleasant thing to realize, in reading a work like this, how
perfectly GENIUS is capable of rendering deeply interesting to the most
general reader topics which in the hands of mere _talent_ become
intolerably 'professional' and dry. The mind which has once flowed
through the golden land of poetry becomes, indeed, like the brook of
Scottish story, more or less alchemizing,--communicating an aureate hue
even to the wool of the sheep which it washes, and turning all its fish
into 'John Dorees.' And in doing this, far from injuring the practical
and market value of either, it positively improves them. For genius is
always general and human, and rises intuitively above conventional
poetry and conventional science, to that higher region where fact and
fancy become identified in truth. And such is the characteristic of the
lecture before us, in which solid, nutritive learning loses none of its
alimentary value for being cooked with all the skill of a _Ude_ or of a
_Francatelli_. Many passages in the work illustrate this power of
aesthetic illustration in a truly striking manner.

In certain points of view, human anatomy may be considered an
almost exhausted science. From time to time some small organ,
which had escaped earlier observers, has been pointed out,--such
parts as the _tensor tarsi_, the otic ganglion, or the Pacinian
bodies; but some of the best anatomical works are those which have
been classic for many generations. The plates of the bones of
Vesalius, three centuries old, are still masterpieces of accuracy,
as of art. The magnificent work of Albinus on the muscles,
published in 1747, is still supreme in its department, as the
constant references of the most thorough recent treat