DR. ANDREW COMBE. Valetudinis conservationem, quæ sine dubio primum est hujus vitæ bonum, et cæterorum omnium fundamentum. Animus enim adeò à temperamento et organorum corporis dispositione pendet, ut si ratio aliqua possit inveniri, quæ homines sapientiores et ingeniosiores reddat quàm hactenus fuerunt, credam illam in Medicina quæri debere.'-RENATUS Descartes De Methodo, vi. DESCARTES • Ovid observes that there are more fine days than cloudy ones in the year "Si numeres anno soles et nubila toto, It may be said likewise, that the days wherein men enjoy their health are in greater number than those wherein they are sick. But there is perhaps as much misery in fifteen days' sickness, as there is pleasure in fifteen years' health.'-BAYLE, under the word PERICLES. 'Eunt homines mirari alta montium, ingentes fluctus maris, altissimos lapsus fluminum, oceani ambitum et gyros siderumseipsos relinquunt nec admirantur.'-ST. AUSTIN. DR. ANDREW COMBE. WE E do not know a worthier subject for an essay in one of our larger Medical Journals, than to determine the just position of such a man as Dr. Combe in the history of Medicine-showing what it was in theory and in practice, in its laws as a science, and in its rules as an art-when he made his appearance on its field, and what impression his character and doctrines have made upon the public as requiring, and upon his brethren as professing to furnish, the means of health. The object of such an essay would be to make out how far Dr. Combe's principles of inquiry, his moral postulates, his method of cure, his views of the powers and range of medicine as a science, estimative, rather than exact, his rationale of human nature as composite and in action,-how far all these influences may be expected to affect the future enlargement, enlightenment, and quickening of that art which is, par excellence, the art of life,and whose advance, in a degree of which we can, from its present condition, form little conception, was believed by one of the greatest intellects of any age (Descartes) to be destined to play a signal part in making mankind more moral, wiser, and happier, as well as stronger, longer-lived, and healthier. The cause of morality-of everything that is connected with the onward movement of the race-is more dependent upon the bodily health, upon the organic soundness of the human constitution, than many poli ticians, moralists, and divines seem ready to believe. Dr. Combe was not, perhaps, what is commonly called a man of genius; that is, genius was not his foremost and most signal and efficient quality. He made no brilliant discovery in physiology or therapeutics, like some of his contemporaries. He did not, as by a sudden flash of light, give form, and symmetry, and meaning to the nervous system, as did Sir Charles Bell, when he proved that every nerve is double; that its sheath, like the Britannia Bridge, contains two lines, carrying two trains-an up and a down; the sensory, as the up, bringing knowledge from without of all sorts to the brain; the motory, as the down, carrying orders from the same great centre of sensation and will. Neither did he, like Dr. Marshall Hall, render this discovery more exquisite, by adding to it that of the excitomotor nerves—the system of reflex action, by which, with the most curious nicety and art (for Nature is |