EDITORIAL OBSERVATIONS. 
479 
under his charge a particular subject, carried his studies in 
it as far as he could carry them, and lectured in it to all who 
approached him. Being the standard of his particular sub¬ 
ject, tutors themselves were quite willing to come and sit at 
the feet of the professor, and so keep up their own knowledge 
of the subject. He had an impression—it might be quite 
erroneous—that the system of teaching medicine was too 
much professorial and too little tutorial. They would under¬ 
stand what he meant when he explained what the tutor did. 
The professor took in hand a particular subject, while the 
tutor looked after the education of the pupil. He assembled 
round him a small number of men in a room, opened a text 
book, and explanations out of that book were given ; but 
from the very first questions to the pupils went hand in hand 
with explanations from the tutor. In that particular thing 
lay the point and essence of the whole system—in the par¬ 
ticular fact that the attention was what he would call active 
attention, as distinguished from passive attention, from the 
very first. No sooner had a man had half an hour’s instruction , 
than he was asked for some return in the shape of ansvoers to 
questions. It might be that he was prejudiced in favour of 
this method, that this kind of active attention was very 
easily given on the part of the pupil, whereas the passive 
attention, which received and gave nothing back, was very 
difficult to maintain. He maintained the tutorial system as 
against the professorial, not that he did not see great ad¬ 
vantages also in the latter, but because he thought, on the 
whole, that for a place where subjects were to be taught' 
to the average run of men, and where they considered the 
men more than the subject, the tutorial system, in some 
of its modifications, was the system most profitable to be 
employed. He had heard that the lectures the students of 
the hospitals are expected to attend varied from fourteen to 
twenty-one in the week. He thought that an extraordinary 
number. At Oxford, where the lectures were easier, they 
thought twelve in the week a very good average, and even 
with that number, towards the end of their time, when pre¬ 
paring for examination, students often come to their tutors to 
be excused from attending lectures, and the request was 
granted as a matter of course. There was clearly a great 
difference between the hospital system and that of Oxford 
with respect to the number of lectures. While confessing 
his ignorance of the matter as regarded them, still, having 
formed an impression of human nature,- he was disposed to 
say a word in favour of mercy with regard to the number of 
lectures. It seemed to him almost impossible that a man could 
