RECENT ADVANCES IN SCIENCE. 341 



use of as it goes along at any time and in any place ; whereas the 

 mind which is not well trained will miss the facts or pick up the wrong 

 ones, or put to a wrong use even the right ones which it has in hand. 



Now, the ideal training to be got from any science is that of pursuing 

 inquiry within the range of the science according to the methods of 

 the science; in that way only does the spirit of the science fully enter 

 into the man. But such an ideal education is impossible. We are fain 

 to be content in merely making the student know what truths in each 

 science have been gained and how they have been gathered in, such a 

 teaching becoming more and more effective as a training the more fully 

 the student is made to tread in the very steps, and thus to practice the 

 methods, of those who gained the truths. 



The more complete the body of any one science the more useful does 

 that science become as a means of training, and hence it is that advance 

 of science has a double bearing on the medical profession. As each 

 science grows, not only does its new knowledge bring to the doctor new 

 facts and new ideas, new keys to open locked problems, and new tools 

 to use day by day, but the incorporated knowledge gains greater and 

 greater power as an instrument to train his mind rightly to use all the 

 facts which come before him. 



Let me, in the light of this view, call your attention for a moment to 

 the yoke of compulsory studies under which the young Huxley had to 

 bend his somewhat unruly neck, and compare it with the like yoke 

 which presses, heavily it seems to some, on the neck of the young 

 student of to-day. 



I have not been able to find an exact record of the course of studies 

 pursued by Huxley himself at Charing Cross in the years 1842-1845, 

 but I have been privileged to examine the stained and tattered sched- 

 ule of the College of Surgeons, duly u signed up," for the years 1844- 

 1847, belonging to one who, during some of those years, sat by Hux- 

 ley's side, who was then and afterwards his friend, and who has won 

 honor for himself and for your school under the name of Joseph Fayrer. 



I find that young Fayrer attended during his first year a course of 

 at least 140 lectures with 100 demonstrations on anatomy and physiol- 

 ogy, a course of not less than 70 lectures on materia medica, a course 

 of lectures on the practice of surgery, and a course of "The practice of 

 physics," each of not less than 70 lectures, and a course of hospital 

 practice in surgery of not less than nine months. In his second year 

 he again attended the 140-lecture course on anatomy and physiology, 

 and the 70-lecture course on the practice of surgery, and again hospital 

 practice in surgery, taking as well a 70-lecture course in chemistry, a 

 like course in midwifery and hospital practice in medicine. In his 

 third year he once more attended the 140-lecture course in anatomy and 

 physiology, but no other systematic lectures; the rest of his time was 

 devoted to hospital practice. To these demands of the college of sur- 

 geons Ave ought to add, in the case of the ordinary student, the demands 



