II.] UNIVERSITIES I ACTUAL AND IDEAL. 49 



practical acquaintance, to guard against the supposi- 

 tion that my intention is to suggest that you ought 

 all to be minute anatomists and accomplished physi- 

 ologists. The devotion of your whole four years to 

 Anatomy and Physiology alone, would be totally 

 insufficient to attain that end. What I mean is, the 

 sort of practical, familiar, finger-end knowledge which 

 a watchmaker has of a watch, and which you expect 

 that craftsman, as an honest man, to have, when you 

 entrust a watch that goes badly, to him. It is a kind 

 of knowledge which is to be acquired, not in the 

 lecture-room, nor in the library, but in the dissecting- 

 room and the laboratory. It is to be had, not by 

 sharing your attention between these and sundry other 

 subjects, but by concentrating your minds, week after 

 week, and month after month, six or seven hours a 

 day, upon all the complexities of organ and function, 

 until each of the greater truths of anatomy and physi- 

 ology has become an organic part of your minds 

 until you would know them if you were roused and 

 questioned in the middle of the night, as a man knows 

 the geography of his native place and the daily life of 

 his home. That is the sort of knowledge which, once 

 obtained, is a life-long possession. Other occupations 

 may fill your minds it may grow dim, and seem to 

 be forgotten but there it is, like the inscription on a 

 battered and defaced coin, which comes out when you 

 warm it. 



If I had the power to remodel Medical Education, 

 the first two years of the medical curriculum should 

 be devoted to nothing but such thorough study of Ana- 



