spareth the rod hateth the child,” he would have done better had he given him some dry clothes, or sent him for a time to a warm bed. In 1831 John Wanless left Dundee and went to Edinburgh, as a student in the Royal College of Surgeons, under the then celebrated professors McIntosh, Liston, Lizars, Ferguson, and others, fellows of the college, all of whom are now gone to their final rest. During the college session of 1831, his friend, Mr. Hay, offered him the position of surgeon on board the whaling ship _Thomas_, which office he cheerfully accepted, although he was then only seventeen years of age. This good ship sailed from Dundee in March, 1832, and returned with a full cargo in time to permit the young surgeon to attend the opening of the college session of 1832-3. Subsequently during college vacation he went three times to Davis Straits in the same ship, and thereby greatly invigorated his previously rather slender physical frame. While on one of his whaling voyages he one day was out in a boat shooting loons, which are very numerous in Davis Straits, and a good many can be killed by one discharge from a gun. In the act of gathering the killed he espied a wounded bird at a short distance, and in his endeavour to reach it he leaned too far over the gunwale, lost his balance, and went head first into the Arctic sea. His shipmates were alarmed, and waited in dread suspense for some time, but at length he came up, holding on to the loon by one of its legs. The mate afterwards remarked “that the doctor should always be taken with the shooting parties, for he could dive for the wounded fellows.” It may be here mentioned that the doctor was a good swimmer, and as a youth practised swimming in the Tay at Dundee, and was in the habit, sometimes, of carrying younger boys on his back out into the stream, and then throwing them off; but before doing this, however, he always gave them instructions how to swim on their “own hook.” He has been known to swim for three miles on a stretch, resting occasionally on his back. At Pond’s Bay he one time fell out of a boat, while steering with a long oar, amongst a lot of whales. There were about fifty ships’ boats and their crews in a crack in the land ice, which extended about twenty miles from the shore, and in some places the rent was about one hundred yards wide. In this opening the whales were so numerous that the harpooners only selected the largest fish for capture. During the excitement, and when passing another boat, the blade of one of their side oars unshipped the doctor’s steering oar while he was pushing it from him, and, losing his balance, he fell into the water. He however did not feel the least alarmed, but at once struck out for the ice, and, drying his clothes as well as he could, walked to his ship, which was anchored about two miles away, in the field ice, and soon found himself on deck, not much the worse for his ducking. In the spring of 1835,