Educational Topics. 497 



and was only called in extreme cases to consult with the 

 working men — the so-called apothecaries, and the surgeons — 

 who were also the barbers of the time. The barber's pole 

 of to-day is simply the badge of the barber-surgeon of old, 

 the bleeding staff with which the patient supported his arm 

 while being bled, wound about with the ribbons with which 

 the arm was afterwards bandaged. In those old schools and 

 colleges no arts were ever taught. Abstract science, math- 

 ematics, logic and metaphysics, with the languages and lite- 

 rature of two dead and extinct nations, the Greeks and the 

 Komans, were all they taught. The people were not taught 

 at all, and were only considered to be the serfs and the 

 drudores of " their betters." Our ancestors in America are 

 not to be blamed that they only improved a little on the 

 example of their forefathers in organizing the district school, 

 in which the children of the people might be taught to read, 

 write, and cipher a little. They founded academies, too, 

 but these were only as feeders for the colleges, and all the 

 text books, and the whole system of education looked only 

 to making professional men, lawyers, divines and teachers. 



The one profession that was at once scientific and practi- 

 cal, that of medicine, had to organize its own schools, and 

 take its own teachers from its own ranks. In these schools 

 were science and ar. first combined ; and always, froui the 

 beginning, this was thought, in the old world, to be a deg- 

 radation ; and practitioners of medicine to this day, no mat- 

 ter how learned, are not considered to be the social equals 

 of the members of the other professions. Clergymen and 

 lawyers, almost without number, have been raised to the 

 ranks of the nobility in England, as a reward of eminence 



