180 BEVIEWS — THE COUESE OF COLLEGIATE EDUCATION. 



tion in which every member of the community has an interest, and if 

 it be desirable that the degree of M. A., should have a definite and 

 uniform meaning throughout the Province, it is surely no less indis- 

 pensable that that of M. D. should be held by no one but a tho- 

 roughly educated and trained practitioner of the healing art. But is 

 it reasonable to expect that any required number of such learned and 

 philosophical phlebotomists as the Scottish Professor pictures above, 

 should turn up by chance, and at a moment's notice, among the medi- 

 cal practitioners of a new country like Canada, to say nothing of 

 a city of some forty thousand inhabitants. Edinburgh, with 

 a population of four times the number, has filled up two Chairs in her 

 University recently. She might have been supposed to have choice 

 enough among her own world-famous staff. Tet the one was given 

 to Dr. Laycock, of York, the other to Dr. Allman, of Trinity College, 

 Dublin ; and it is by getting the ablest men, irrespective alike of 

 local interests and professional jealousies, that she has become what 

 she is. When, however, she shall get as far ahead as our Metropol- 

 itan Toronto has done, and shall find herself with not one, but three 

 Universities competing with each other for the granting of medical dip- 

 lomas, then — it may be presumed she will make our medical schools 

 her models in all other respects. 



We have spoken of the thoroughness of the education at Cambridge, 

 in the subjects taught and encouraged at that University. That a 

 too limited and exclusive devotion to one or two objects of study has 

 been engrossingly fostered at the Euglish Universities we readily 

 admit ; but even in this respect the evil is more apparent than real, 

 and a little, well and thoroughly learned, is worth all the popular, 

 superficial doses of crude science and learning which figure so grandly 

 under every variety of superlative nomenclature in the prospectuses 

 of American Educational Institutions. Mr. Bristed, after having 

 taken his B. A., degree with honors, at Cambridge, remarks : " I 

 had more opportunities of observing what had often struck me before, 

 — the development which takes place in an Englishman's mind after 

 the age of twenty-two, when he recovers iu two or three years all the 

 ground which he appeared to have lost as compared with an American, 

 Scotch, or Continental student, and gains a great deal more. The 

 Cambridge student acquires manly habits of thinking and reading. 

 He becomes fond of hard mental work, and has a healthy taste in 

 his mental relaxations. The trash of the circulating library he des- 

 pises as he would sugar candy. No works of fiction but the very 

 best, and those rarely, are to be found in his room. Such a taste ia 

 indeed late in forming ; but the habit of mind once started, he goes 



