mum of knowledge in all, meanwhile missing greatly that essential minimum in any, which, after all, is the one thing we want for making a serviceable staff of doctors for the community.

Sagacity, manual dexterity, cultivated and intelligent presence of mind, the tactus eruditus, a kind heart, and a conscience, these, if there at all, are always at hand, always inestimable; and if wanting, though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, I am as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal; and though I understand all mysteries, and all knowledge, I am nothing. I can profit my patient and myself nothing.

In the words of Dr. Latham :1

'In our day there is little fear that students will be spoiled by the recommendation of their instructors to be content with a scanty knowledge, and trust to their own sagacity for the rest. They are not likely to suffer harm by having Sydenham held up as an example for imitation. The fear is of another kind (and it is well grounded), namely, that many men of 1 Clinical Medicine, Lect. I.

the best abilities and good education will be deterred from prosecuting physic as a profession, in consequence of the necessity indiscriminately laid upon all for impossible attainments.'

And again :

'Let us take care then what we are about, and beware how we change the character of the English practitioner of physic. He is sound and unpretending, and full of good sense. What he wants is a little more careful, and a somewhat larger instruction in what bears directly upon the practical part of his profession. Give it him (indeed we are giving it him), and he will become more trustworthy and more respected every day. But for all that is beyond this, we may recommend it, but we must not insist upon it; we must leave it for each man to pursue according to his leisure, his opportunities, and his capacity, and not exaggerate it into a matter of necessity for all. When too much is exacted, too little will be learned; excess on the one hand naturally leads to defect on the other.'

I am almost ashamed of slipping into this volume the rambling paper on Vaughan, my only excuse, and it is none, being that the gentle and heavenly-minded Silurist was a country surgeon. Perhaps a better excuse would be, that I like to show that our medicus may be not only, like Locke, at once a good physician and metaphysician, or, like Adams, equally great as a scholar and a domestic 'leech,' but that he may be a poet too; and, moreover, that we hardworked family doctors, when the day's work is over, and our books posted, our letters answered, and our newspaper duly studied, may take up our Tennyson, our Wordsworth, our Dryden, our Cowper, our Shakspere, or our Scott, and read ourselves pleasantly asleep in our armchair. May this be not seldom the fate of our Henry Vaughan'!

23, RUTLAND STREET,

April 15, 1866.

J. B.

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION.

IN that delightful and provoking book, THE

DOCTOR, etc.,' Southey says: "Prefaces," said Charles Blount, Gent., "Prefaces," according to this flippant, ill-opinioned, and unhappy man, "ever were, and still are, but of two sorts, let the mode and fashions vary as they please, let the long peruke succeed the godly cropt hair; the cravat, the ruff; presbytery, popery; and popery, presby tery again, yet still the author keeps to his old and wonted method of prefacing; when at the beginning of his book he enters, either with a halter round his neck, submitting himself to his reader's mercy whether he shall be hanged or no. or else, in a huffing manner, he appears with the halter in his hand, and threatens to hang his reader, if he gives him not his good word. This, with the excitement of friends to his undertaking, and some few apologies for the want of time, books, and the like, are the constant and usual