BEYLE W3 — THE COUESE OF COLLEGIATE EDUCATION. 179 



Chair seems indispensable, and when the Agriculturists are ready 

 to avail themselves of it, the Professors both of Chemistry and Na- 

 tural History, and perhaps also of Mineralogy and Geology, could 

 supplement their studies with much that is useful, without at all 

 interfering with the strictly professional education, to be learned in 

 the field ; just as the medical student must acquire his practical 

 knowledge, not in the lecture room, but in the hospital wards and 

 the dispensary practice. The following discriminating distinctions 

 of the shrewd Scottish Professor of Greek, John Stuart Blackie, 

 whose letter "on the advancement of learning in Scotland," we have 

 named above, are well worth noticing here : 



" What do we understand by learning ? The word is vague ; and some irre- 

 levant criticisms and pert objections may be anticipated by defining the term 

 distinctly in the outset. A farmer who tills his ground skilfully, aud, by the 

 blessing of God and favour of the elements, stores a large crop of life sustaining 

 fruit in his garners, is not a learned man : he is a man of skill, industry, and 

 experience The same farmer, if, in addition to the careful and skilful cultiva- 

 tion of the soil, according to the received customs of the agricultural profession, 

 he occupies himself with experimenting in various ways so as to produce im- 

 portant agricultural results by the application of new chemical or other scientific 

 principles, may be called a scientific farmer-, or, if you please, an intellectual or 

 a speculative farmer; but no man would think of calling him a learned farmer. 

 Let him, however, in addition to the scientific accomplishments which we have 

 just supposed, be found at his leisure hours, with the help of dictionary and 

 commentary, spelling his way through the Georgics of Virgil, the authors Be 

 Re Rustica of the Romans, and the geoponic writers of the Greeks, we should 

 then have no hesitation in saluting him as a geoponus eruditisshnus, a learned 

 agriculturist and a wonder of the country-side. In the same way, any man who 

 can make a neat incision into your blood-vessels without mistaking an artery for 

 a vein, may be called a skilful phlebotomist, and if he does so in difficult cases, 

 and in the most approved way, he may be called a scientific phlebotomist. But 

 the man who not only can finger a lancet, but will explain to you the whole 

 theory and history of blood-letting, from the precepts of earliest Eg\ r ptian 

 drugmen in pre-Homeric times, to the diaetetic protests of Erasistratus of Ceos 

 in the third century before Christ, and the heroic practice of a stout Broussais 

 and Gregory, of the most recent memory ; such a man who, to great practical 

 skill and dexterity, adds extensive knowledge of the past, well arranged and di- 

 gested by the organic power of ideas, you would call both a learned and a 

 philosophic phlebotomist ; you would be justified in making such a man a pro- 

 fessor of phlebotomy. " 



And this might tempt us into the vexed question of Canadian 

 Medical Education, of which it is sufficient to say that every single 

 member of the community is so vitally interested in the subject that 

 it may surely be left to the common sense of the public at large to 

 put an end to the present state of things, which no man we ever met 

 with pretends to defend. Medicine is the one professional educa- 



