UNIVERSITIES : ACTUAL AND IDEAL. 6\ 



from both ; through its waters, as yet unfurrowed by the keel of any 

 Columbus, lies the road, if such there be, from the one to the other; 

 far away from that Northwest passage of mere speculation, in which 

 so many brave souls have been hopelessly frozen up. 



But, whether I am right or wrong about all this, the patent fact of 

 the limitation of time remains. As the song runs : 



"If a man could be sure 

 That his life would endure 

 For the space of a thousand long years — " 



he might do a number of things not practicable under present con- 

 ditions. Methuselah might, with much propriety, have taken half a 

 century to get his doctor's degree ; and might, very fairly, have been 

 required to pass a practical examination upon the contents of the 

 British Museum, before commencing practice as a promising young fel- 

 low of two hundred, or thereabouts. But you have four years to do 

 your work in, and are turned loose, to save or slay, at two or three and 

 twenty. 



Now, I put it to you, whether you think that, w^hen you come down 

 to the realities of life — when you stand by the sick-bed, racking your 

 brains for the principles which shall furnish you with the means of 

 interpreting symptoms, and forming a rational theory of the condition 

 of your patient — it will be satisfactory for you to find that those prin- 

 ciples are not there, but that, to use the examination slang which is 

 unfortunately too familiar to me, you can quite easily " give an account 

 of the leading peculiarities of the 3IarsupiaUa^'' or " enumerate the 

 chief characters of the Compositm^^ or " state the class and order of 

 the animal from which castoreum is obtained." 



I really do not think that state of things wdll be satisfactory to 

 you ; I am very sure it will not be so to your patient. Indeed, I am 

 so narrow-minded myself, that if I had to choose between two physi- 

 cians — one who did not know whether a whale was a fish or not, and 

 could not tell gentian from ginger, but did understand the applications 

 of the institutes of medicine to his art ; while the other, like Talley- 

 rand's doctor, " knew every thing, even a little physic " — with all my 

 love for breadth of culture, I should assuredly consult the former. 



It is not pleasant to incur the suspicion of an inclination to injure 

 or depreciate particular branches of knowledge. But the fact, that 

 one of those which I should have no hesitation in excluding from the 

 medical curriculum is that to which my own life has been specially 

 devoted, should, at any rate, defend me from the suspicion of being 

 urged to this course by any but the very gravest considerations of the 

 public welfare. 



And I should like, further, to call your attention to the important 

 circumstance that, in thus proposing the exclusion of the study of 

 such branches of knowledge as zoology and botany, from those com- 



