the prompt performance of important and difficult operations; we have seen that, unless such operations are performed immediately, and with the utmost skill, life is inevitably lost. In many such cases there is no time to send for other assistance. If a country practitioner (and most of these young men go to the country) be not himself capable of doing what is proper to be done, the death of the patient is certain. We put it to the reader to imagine what the feelings of an ingenuous young man must be, who is aware of what he ought to do, but who is conscious that his knowledge is not sufficient to authorise him to attempt to perform it, and who sees his patient die before him, when he knows that he might be saved and that it would have been in his own power to save him, had he been properly educated. We put it to the reader to conceive what his own sensations would be, were an ignorant surgeon, with a rashness more fatal than the criminal modesty of the former, to undertake an important operation. Suppose it were a tumour, which turned out to be an aneurism; suppose it were a hernia, in operating on which the epigastric artery were divided, or the intestine itself wounded; suppose it were his mother, his wife, his sister, his child, whom he thus saw perish before his eyes, what would the reader then think of the prejudice which withholds from the surgeon that information without which the practice of his profession is murder? The study of anatomy is a severe and laborious study; the practice of dissection is on many accounts highly repulsive: it is even not without danger to life itself.[A] To men of clear understandings, to those especially of a philosophical turn of mind, the pursuit is its own reward; they are so fully satisfied that the more it is cultivated the more satisfaction it will afford, that they need no stimulus to induce them to undergo the drudgery. But this is by no means the case with ordinary minds. The fatigue and disgust of the dissecting-room are appalling to them, and they need the stimulus of necessity to urge them to the task. The court of examiners of the College of Surgeons requires from the candidates for surgical diplomas certificates that they have gone through at least two courses of dissections; the examiners at Apothecaries’-hall do not require such certificates. The consequence is, that many young men content themselves with attending lectures, and with passing their examinations at Apothecaries’-hall, and do not apply for a diploma at the College of Surgeons. This single fact is sufficient to demonstrate to the public that, instead of throwing obstacles in the way of dissection, it is a duty which they owe to themselves to afford every possible facility to its practice, and to hold out to every member of the profession, the most powerful inducements to engage in it, by rewarding with confidence those who cultivate anatomy, by making excellence in anatomy indispensable to all offices in dispensaries and