40 ANDREW JACKSON HOWE. 



What the student of medicine needs is education 

 enough to enable him to prosecute his studies in col- 

 lege with comparative ease; and such an amount em- 

 braces a good English training and some knowledge 

 of Latin and Greek. If only the alphabet of the hit- 

 ter be known, the characters can be rendered in 

 L a tin in English. A year's training in Latin en- 

 sures a sufficient acquaintance with the language to 

 master anatomical terms. If a student be fitted to 

 enter Harvard or Yale, he is creditably prepared to 

 pursue the study of medicine. His scholarship is 

 then above reproach. For the indigent among aspi- 

 rants for medical degrees, the farm is a place where a 

 young man can work enough to pay his way, and at 

 the same time obtain a creditable knowledge of anat- 

 omy, physiology, botany and natural history. Let 

 him buy a few text books (which have to be owned 

 sooner or later), a work on anatomy, a physiological 

 treatise, an elementary guide to botany, and a book 

 on the elements of zoology. In every rural district 

 there is a scholarly citizen who con amore would give 

 a little time each week to hear a lesson in the Latin 

 reader, give an explanation to the technicals of bot- 

 any, and discuss the salient points in zoology. 



The school teacher in a country village, who may 

 be ambitious to study medicine, will find time to recite 

 lessons in Latin to the preacher, who is glad to refresh 

 his memory in classical lore. If the pedagogue com- 

 plain that his duties are already onerous, I can assure 

 him that the memorizing of a paradigm will prove 

 recreative. We see that the teeth of animals are so 

 placed in the two jaws that, through attrition, they 

 become self sharpeners ; so it is with human pursuits 

 the mind is not only rested by dropping one subject 



