man of profound learning, and it is astonishing that one
so constantly occupied with the duties of an engrossing profession
should have found the time for such close and thorough general reading.

He was a sincere and earnest Christian, and held the Bible in the
highest veneration. He wrote an able defense of the use of it as a
school-book, and for many years was vice-president of the Philadelphia
Bible Society, which he helped to establish, and the constitution of
which he drafted. He held skepticism and atheism in the deepest
abhorrence, and in his own life affords a powerful refutation of the
assertion one hears so often, that profound medical knowledge is apt to
make men infidels.

He died in Philadelphia on the 19th of April, 1813, at the good old age
of sixty-eight, leaving a son who was destined to render additional
luster to his name by achieving the highest distinction as a statesman.

CHAPTER XXXVIII.

VALENTINE MOTT.

Valentine Mott was born at Glen Cove, on Long Island, on the 20th of
August, 1785. His father, Dr. Henry Mott, was an eminent practitioner in
the city of New York, where he died in 1840, at the age of eighty-three.
Valentine Mott was carefully educated by private tutors until he reached
the age of nineteen, when he entered Columbia College, New York, as a
medical student, and at the same time became a private medical pupil of
his kinsman, Dr. Valentine Seaman. At the age of twenty-one he graduated
with the degree of M.D.; but feeling that he had not acquired as good a
medical education as the schools of the Old World could afford, he
sailed for Europe in 1806, within a few weeks after his graduation at
Columbia College. Proceeding to London, he was for more than a year a
regular attendant upon St. Thomas', Bartholomew's, and Guy's hospitals,
where he conducted his clinical studies under the direction of
Abernethy, Sir Charles Bell, and Sir Astley Cooper. He chose Sir Astley
Cooper as his private instructor, and became one of his favorite pupils;
and also attended the lectures of Currie and Haighton. From London he
went to Edinburgh, where he attended the lectures of Hope, Playfair, and
Gregory, as well as the prelections of Dugald Stewart. From Edinburgh
he went to Paris, and completed his studies in the great hospitals of
that city.

He gave evidence at an early day of his great surgical abilities. He was
indeed a born surgeon, possessing in a remarkable degree that peculiar
ada