qualified, he would have had the strongest possible claim to, appears to us neither more nor less than arrant nonsense. We shall not attempt to insult the common sense of our readers by attempting a defense where there is no crime.

The stormy virtue of some people is very amusing. When other people's interests are alone concerned, it is like what hurricanes are now said to be-enormous whirlwinds, into whose vortices every body's faults are drawn with indiscriminate voracity; but when their own are concerned, there is an easy calmness which looks with complacent eye on the necessary expediencies of life, and declares all beyond to be moonshine or Utopianism.

A curious incident occurred in illustration of this about that time. Sir Astley Cooper had, without the smallest intention to give offense, made some observation on the somewhat too free use of some medicine (mercury) at that time in the Borough Hospitals. His observations having been misunderstood or misrepresented, he took occasion to remove any idea of intentional offense by addressing the class. Among other things, he is reported to have said, "Why, gentlemen, was it likely that I should say any thing unkind toward these gentlemen? Is not Mr. Green my godson (surgeon of St. Thomas's), Mr. Tyrrel my nephew, Mr. Travers my apprentice (surgeons of St. Thomas's), Mr. Key my nephew, Mr. Cooper my nephew?" (surgeons of Guy's).

This was very naïve, and a good illustration of the value of evidence in relation to one thing which is stated in relation to another.

But we have no desire to say more on this subject than to express our conviction that no man ever did

more for another, in the worldly sense of the word, than (respective relations considered) Mr. Abernethy did for Mr. Stanley. It is not in the power of any one man to do more by position than to furnish the elements for the fortune of another. The combining of them depends on the individual; and whether that exist or not in the present case is not important, as we are happy to hear that fortune has in another way rendered it unnecessary; we have only to regret that any circumstances should have led to the expression of a "disinclination," where a contrary sentiment might have been so gracefully indulged in, and with no greater advantage to any body than to Mr. Stanley.

The whole of Mr. Abernethy's closing career at the Hospital gave him no great reason to rejoice at the Hospital System. Men who could see nothing in leav ing very much more important situations to an indefinite succession of apprentices, caviled at a prospective lectureship for his only son; while his lectures were delivered over to two gentlemen, one of whom had from an early period ridiculed, as he said, the opinions which he taught as, and which we now know to have been, John Hunter's, and another, with whom there had been several not very pleasing associations.

This was necessarily a result of the "Hospital System;" a system that gave a still more melancholy and fatal close to the labors of John Hunter, whose death took place suddenly in the board-room of St. George's Hospital, while resisting an interference with a privilege which his love of science rendered valuable to him, and which it was for the interests of science that he should enjoy; but, mournful as these results are, and many others that might be added, still, if we found

that the system worked well for science, we might rest satisfied; but is it so? What advances have hospital surgeons of London, under the apprentice system, made in the science of surgery? Let those answer the question who are desirous of maintaining this system. For our own parts, the retrospect seems to show the system in a more complete manner than any thing we have yet stated. John Hunter, that primus inter omnes, was no hospital apprentice; he migrated from St. Bartholomew's, where the rule was too exclusive to give him a chance, to St. George's, where he obtained admittance; St. Bartholomew's preserved the system and lost Hunter.

Abernethy was an apprentice truly; but all those glorious labors which shed such a lustre on his profession and such a benefit on mankind, were completed long before he became surgeon to St. Bartholomew's Hospital; and it is material to repeat, that at that time the assistant surgeons, with the exceptions already stated, had nothing to do. In casting our eyes over the retrospect of years, one honored name attracts our notice in connection with a real advance in the knowledge of the functions of nerves. We allude to Sir Charles Bell; but here again the system is unfortunate, for Sir Charles was never a hospital apprentice at all, and only succeeded to a post in a London hospital after an open canvass in an institution in which the narrow portal of the apprentice system is unrecognized. Still we see signs of a "Delenda est Carthago;" as we have said, the point of the wedge is inserted, and a very little extension of public information will at no distant period drive it home.

In the mean time, Science, instead of being in a po

sition to receive every quackery as a means of demonstrating the superior beauty of truth, by placing it in contrast with error, is obliged to regard any absurdity, however gross, as one of the hydra-headed fallacies through which we are to evolve what is true only by the circuitous path of exhausting the resources of hypothesis and conjecture, while sweeping epidemics, which, wholesomely regarded, should be looked on reverently as besoms of destruction, are hailed by the observant as melancholy but necessary impulses to drive us to the adoption of measures to which our capital of common sense is not sufficient to induce us to listen.

Neither are the old hospitals the only parts of a defective system. In others we observe the signs of the prurient appetencies of trade usurping the lofty aspirations of science. There is no hospital in London that yet has even a country establishment of its own for convalescents, while of two of the more recently established ones, one is built over a church-yard, and the other, intended only for the relief of decarbonizing organs, is built in the immediate neighborhood of the most smoky metropolis in Europe. Both, instead of being the most distinguished illustrations of the progress of sanitary and physiological science, are, on the contrary, emphatic examples of their violation.

CHAPTER XXX.

"There is no doubt but men of genius and leisure may carry our method to greater perfection, but, having had long experience, we have found none equal to it for the commodiousness it affords in working with the Understanding."-LORD BACON, vol. iii., p 316, 4th ed.

IN tracing the progress of science, it is very difficult to assign to each individual his just share of merit. The evidence, always more or less incomplete, seldom allows us to do more than to mark the more fortunate, to whom, as it were, the principal parts have been allotted. The exposition of truth generally implies a previous contest with error; this may, in one sense, be compared with military achievements. We hear of the skill and wisdom of the general and his associate chiefs, but little is known of individual prowess on the multiplication of which the result so commonly depends.

To one who conferred so many obligations on his country and on mankind as Abernethy, it is difficult to assign only his just share, and yet it is most desirable that nothing be ascribed to him which is doubtful or disputable.

Antecedently to Mr. Abernethy's time, and contemporaneous with the date of Mr. Hunter's labors, surgery had, in the best hands, and as a mere practical art, arrived at a very respectable position; still, in Abernethy's early day, barber-surgeons were not yet extinct, and, as he used jocosely to phrase it, he himself had "doffed his cap" to barber-surgeons. There is no doubt that some of them had arrived at a very useful knowl