MEDICINE IN MODEBN TIMES. 713 



what reasoning and reasons are in one subject, will be apt to look 

 for similar reasons and similar reasoning when he has to deal with 

 another, and especially and rightly if that other be a closely allied 

 subject. And when natural knowledge shall have become more 

 widely and generally diffused, an end which we may hope to help 

 towards accomplishing by means of our School of Physical Science, 

 quackery, with its painful spectacles of reputation and confidence 

 unfairly withheld and more unfairly bestowed, will cease to flourish 

 in its present rank exuberance. A worker in Biology gains repu- 

 tation accordingly as he is acute enough to observe and generalise 

 for himself, and accordingly as he is conscientious enough to make 

 himself master of and duly acknowledge the labours of others. It 

 cannot be said that learning, talent, and labour are equally certain 

 to secure prominence either for a medical doctrine or a medical 

 practitioner. The medical doctrine obtains currency, acceptance, 

 and popularity, and the confidence of an ill-educated public, by 

 virtue ordinarily either of the effect on the imagination which its 

 paradoxical character secures for it, or of the effect on the 

 ear of the alliterative ring of the phraseology in which it is em- 

 bodied. The success of persons, again, in the medical profession, 

 and in some other walks of life too, may depend on personal quali- 

 ties quite other than any connected with diligence, attainment, or 

 ability — upon, say, certain peculiarities of manner, either in the 

 way of polish or in that of roughness. The greatness of the stake, 

 his own health, for which a man is playing when he adopts a par- 

 ticular doctrine or doctor of medicine, no doubt disturbs the balance 

 of such powers of judgment as he may have, much as in Gessler's 

 hopes the placing of an apple on the head of TelFs son disturbed 

 the steadiness of the father's hand and eye* But habits of thought, 

 as of other things, may be acquired by a proper course of educa- 

 tion, and habits, like drill, steady a man under emergencies ; and a 

 scientific training enables a man to set about forming a right 

 judgment in a right way and upon proper and legitimate grounds, 

 even when nothing less than life itself is at stake. If a know- 

 ledge of such a subject as Comparative Anatomy, and of its external 

 aspect, scientific Zoology, is a knowledge which will give the lay- 

 man more power of forming right decisions, it is perhaps needless 

 to labour long at showing that this self-same knowledge may be of 

 the like service to the professional man. A sort of practical proof 



