II.] UNIVERSITIES : ACTUAL AND IDEAL. 5 1 



ones ; that he ought to know drugs, as a druggist 

 knows them, or he will not be able to tell sham bark 

 and senna from the real articles ; that he ought to 

 know Zoology, because well, I really have never 

 been able to learn exactly why he is to be expected 

 to know zoology. There is, indeed, a popular super- 

 stition, that doctors know all about things that are 

 queer or nasty to the general mind, and may, there- 

 fore, be reasonably expected to know the " barbarous 

 binomials " applicable to snakes, snails, and slugs ; an 

 amount of information with which the general mind 

 is usually completely satisfied. And there is a scien- 

 tific superstition that Physiology is largely aided by 

 Comparative Anatomy a superstition which, like 

 most superstitions, once had a grain of truth at bot- 

 tom; but the grain has become homosopathic, since 

 Physiology took its modern experimental develop- 

 ment, and became what it is now, the application of 

 the principles of Physics and Chemistry to the eluci- 

 dation of the phenomena of life. 



I hold as strongly as any one can do, that the 

 medical practitioner ought to be a person of education 

 and good general culture ; but I also hold by the old 

 theory of a Faculty, that a man should have his general 

 culture before he devotes himself to the special studies 

 of that Faculty ; and I venture to maintain, that, if 

 the general culture obtained in the Faculty of Arts 

 were what it ought to be, the student would have 

 quite as much knowledge of the fundamental principles 

 of Physics, of Chemistry, and of Biology, as he needs, 

 before he commenced his special medical studies. 



