to what shall seem, to smallness outside, its variability or inconsistency.

To die daily, that is the attribute of this mind; to be tomorrow what it was not to-day, and to admit the fact; to be firm always in work and object, to be obstinate never in question of result; to know and feel that no other criticism is, or can be, so severe and just as its own; to be ready to give up the choicest belief under conviction, but not to allow the sneers or opposition of the ignorant or half-learned to quicken doubt. To look on praise with due scepticism, and to hold to nothing wrongly because the delighted world calls Sufficit.

Such, according to my view, is the only frame and condition of mind through which medicine can advance in first principles of research.

I dwell on this view because, if it be true, it corrects a fundamental error in our systems everywhere. The accepted dogma is that medical science and art is to be advanced only by practice. Is that true? Is that true? I entirely repudiate the dogma. That a man may practise and practise well, and at the same time advance the art on primary principles, is true; but his two progressions must be essentially distinct. Into that which he would advance by first principles no trace of worldly spirit must enter; pierced once in his nobler life by his lesser art, he is from that moment disabled; he is no longer a unit, but a section of a crowd.

Hence, I often fear lest, in the future, some of the great rewards of the deserving in medicine may come to those who live outside the pale;—who, impassionless, uninfluenced by the discords within, seeing the feebleness within too shrewdly, and scorning it, shall proceed alone and win, without care, by the development of truths which come only through serenity of observation.

This idea as to the men through whom science must rise direct from nature is supported by the great facts of history.

It is quite certain that in all the sciences which have risen to exactitude, the leaders of those sciences have been men who worked for exactitude, and with no other object in their advancing studies. They have sometimes been men who have followed particular occupations for the means of existence, and have turned the profits of their calling to their higher aim and work; but that higher work itself was pure. Thus our own Kepler, first great prince of astronomers, while he lived in his little black tent, and turned it into a camera, and anon practised medicine, was meanwhile making silently that divine, divine because pure, discovery of a common bond of suns and worlds, which, won at last, led him to exclaim, in the grandeur of inspiration:-"Nothing holds me. I will indulge my sacred fury! If you forgive me, I rejoice; if you are angry, I can bear it. The die is cast. The book is written, to be read either now, or by posterity, I care not which. It may well wait a century for a reader, since God. has waited six thousand years for an observer."

In like manner, our Harvey, labouring out the problem of his life, dissevered the work from the routine of professional toil, and yielding to Sir Simon Baskerville the éclat of the successful practitioner, so called, was content to discover what Sir Simon, in his sublime practical wisdom, never knew, except, as to him, a useless mystery, the circulation of the blood.

Unity of Research.

After the frame and constitution of mind, the order of research comes before us for contemplation. And here, the first principle that requires to be recognised, is the principle of unity. At this moment, by the incoherent recognition of this unity, we are tearing our science to shreds, and hoping that, by combining the patchwork, we may produce a seamless garment. The conception is as feeble as it is motley. As the

firmament is of one azure blue, as the heavens are in order, so the science that shall be perfect must be in harmony. Neither must our study be confined to one particular subject; it must extend to each science, and unite each one in the whole. From the rest of the science world, nothing should separate the Physician and Surgeon, except the art, which, in fact, is the craft-work of the science, developing it, but not producing. Shall one man be a mere physiologist, another man a mere pathologist, this a diagnostic, that a therapeutist? 'Tis trifling with nature. Test the matter by comparison. There is before us a mechanism, an engine which we have not invented, and the action of which we know not. To investigate it, to learn it in its unity, shall we divide ourselves into exclusive sections? Shall some discoverers take the engine to pieces, and figure each of its parts, its wheels and its pistons, its boiler and its condenser, its regulator and its tender? In truth, they shall do much. Shall others investigate the relations of these parts, their motion, their order of motion, the product? They shall also do much. Shall a third set examine the engine when out of gear, listen to its creakings, and grindings, and shakings, and look into its chambers and tubes, and valves, and feel its throbbings and heavings? They shall do much. Shall a fourth division take the useless engine and examine its disabled parts in detail, and describe them? They shall do much. Lastly, shall a set treating badly working engines, try to restore them by casting various fuels into the furnace, or by letting off steam, or cutting off excrescences, or patching up holes? They, too, shall do much; and, in mere handicraft, they shall, perchance, sometimes do a vast deal. In a word, all shall do well who labour in their respective callings thus far, and the division of labour shall be true, and the results natural, within their legitimate bounds.

But, if thus dividing ourselves into varied labour, we physi

cians allow the work we take in hand to isolate us from all other work; if we make one work predominate; if we give fashion to one department, and hold that up as the beau idéal of our study; if we make our divisions play the role of independent centres, then we advance not a jot-not a jot, but become the creatures, rulers, or subjects, of petty sovereignties, each alike poor, proud, and powerless; and, however so often the animal engine comes before us, sound or unsound, though it be before us under infinite variety of form every minute of our lives, and in a sense be the perpetual study of our lives, yet shall we, by the course we take, gain no more knowledge of the principle of the engine than the simple savage who contemplates a steam engine, with combined wonder, fear, admiration, and instinctive desire to know.

In physic, however, this divisional method of research, this centrifugal disintegration, is so much the passion that no man can be held learned who does not follow it. A man may be a great pathologist, a great physiologist, a great anatomist, a great diagnostician, a great microscopist, but a great physician he must not be; nay, after isolating his own greatness as widely as possible from other greatnesses, and after what he calls carving out for himself a speciality even in his own department, he will be content, flying, under the centrifugal propulsion, out of nature altogether, content to tell you that it is absurd, as, indeed, I fear it is for him, to try to master any subject save his own.

In the interests of science, in the interests of humanity, this centrifugal training and cultivation must really cease, if we, as a body, would stand a power; it is landing us breathless, companionless, naked, on the shores of folly, there to set up squalid huts and think ourselves kings. When a man, led by this propulsion, prides himself as I have heard a man pride himself, and his friends for him, that, pursuing his speciality with almost supernatural vigour, he has made so many thou

sands of minute dissections and measurements of one particular organ of the animal body, I may laugh at the conceit of the individual, but I must weep if I contemplate, solemnly, the terrible and chaotic imbecility of a system which allows such lost labour to pass for great labour, and which cheers the loss. If so simple a thing as a steam engine could never be learned off, as an engine, by such form of study, nor by any number of such isolated studies, how can it be expected that the unity of the animal machine can be advanced by research, in its case so infinitely less efficient?

It

I speak thus for the argument of science; I speak, feebly echoing the voice which proclaims everywhere the unity of nature, and the All-creative Intellect. But I am not unconscious that an argument from another side may be used against me, and which, on the principle of every man for himself, and heaven for us all, may be potently wielded. may be urged that medical art and science, themselves of the earth earthy, must move with the earth as it is; that external influences, apart from them truly, but within the sphere of attraction, must tell upon them, and that, to succeed, they must conform to what may even be the prejudices of mankind. This stated, as a primary, it may further be urged that the whole tendency of the present day is to division of labour; that there is an earnest belief-fair or false it matters not-in favour of such a division, and that medicine to thrive must run in the current with the rest, and even at the risk of scientific dissolution must divide! divide! divide! Is it, indeed, so? Grant it, and medicine is in fragments which rub together, make noise, crash, and fall even to the lowest depth. Grant it, and where shall we limit the disintegration. Grant it, and how shall the world put on it any limitation, and why shall there not be as many classes of healers as there are organs, each healer having status according to the vital importance of the organ he treats. For my part, in humilia

LANE LIBRARY, STANFO