588 
Review. 
Quid sit pulchrum, quid turpe, quid utile, quid non. — H or. 
The Sciefice and Art of Surgery ; being a Treatise on Surgical 
Injuries , Diseases , and Operations. By John Erichsen, 
Professor of Surgery and of Clinical Surgery in University 
College, and University College Hospital. Second edition. 
Enlarged and carefully revised. Illustrated by Four 
Hundred Engravings on Wood. London : Walton and 
Maberly, 1857. 
It requires just now an effort for the professional writer 
to persuade himself that the importance of his calling is 
no less real than has been hitherto generally supposed. The 
din of war is so loud, the howl for national vengeance so 
terrible, that the man whose every thought is peace and 
retirement for the cultivation of the understanding all but 
begins to fear that he may be swallowed up, body and soul, 
in the universal whirl, and that to the next generation 
Vhomme de lettres will be as curious a mental hallucination, as 
the sea serpent has certainly been in the imaginative crea- 
tions of contemporaries. 
In bygone years September was a singularly pacific month 
for the schoolmen ; cheerful rusticators, fresh from Killarney 
and Loch Lomond, greeted their no less enlivened friends 
returning from the Oberland and the Lake of Garda, and 
all looked on the 1st of October as the new year's day of 
scientific pedagogues, as the commencement of another 
period in the silent life of the most peaceable of men. But 
this year all is sorrow and agitation. The spirit of destruc- 
tion has unsheathed its sword, the rage is for arms, the thirst 
for vengeance, and the resolve for death. But storms, how- 
ever terrible, can never be but storms— periodical convulsions 
in which the general order of things is disturbed for no other 
