198 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



you omit this they will be feeble and barren in their results. When 

 you read or are told that an artery pulsates, that it is composed of so 

 many coats, each possessing peculiar properties and uses, you will see 

 and feel the artery to beat, you will examine its coats, you will see 

 their properties exemplified in life, in death, in health, and in disease : 

 in health, when it is divided by the knife, or tied to arrest haemor- 

 rhage ; in disease, when it is the seat of aneurism and other changes. 

 Of what service would it be to you to read of all this ? You would be 

 better almost without such miserably insufficient information. Besides, 

 what you read may not be true ; you will decide for yourselves wheth- 

 er it is or not. If you wish to see the result of an education which 

 makes a man arrive at an opinion accurately, act boldly, display man- 

 ual dexterity, and effect good results, you may see it in any of the sur- 

 geons while deligating an artery to cui-e an aneurism. Again, suppos- 

 ing you to have made yourselves acquainted with the most complete 

 account of typhoid fever, and simply to have supplemented what you 

 have so learned by looking at any number of cases, and hearing what 

 others have to say upon them. Until you have tested for yourselves 

 the truth of all that you have heard or read about the disease, your 

 knowledge would be worse than useless, for you might fancy that j^ou 

 know something about it, and, armed with such conceit, have the ef- 

 frontery to take charge of a patient so suffering. When you have seen 

 patients every day from the beginning to the end of the fever, have 

 taken the temperature of their bodies and noted its variations, become 

 so familiar with their pulses that you recognize the period at which it 

 may be necessary to administer stimulants, examined the excretions, 

 watched the changes in symptoms, noted the effects of treatment, ob- 

 served every detail in diet and nursing, made j^ourselves acquainted 

 with the affections which the fever leaves behind, witnessed the modes 

 of death with patients who do not recover, examined the 2^ost-mortem 

 changes in those who die from it, and, lastly (most important of all) 

 have discovered the source whence the fever arose — if you have done 

 all these things, your knowledge of the subject will be real, and you 

 will have learned that, though books have their uses, they should in 

 science and medicine be only used for the purpose of directing atten- 

 tion to what is to be looked for, and as a means of comparing the 

 observations of others with your own. Thus far, then, books may be 

 relied upon and no further. If this be so, the very essence and good- 

 ness of a scientific education is lost when a student endeavors to pass 

 his examinations by learning from text-books what he should have 

 taught himself by observation, and from pictures what he should have 

 learned from realities. Those whose information is so gained have 

 seized the shadow instead of the substance, and their work will for 

 ever bear the marks of their indifferent education. 



The results of the two modes of acquiring knowledge will be seen 

 in the different classes of practitioners which they respectively pro- 



