be--and will be. The rich will always have it in their power to select, for the performance of an operation, the surgeon who has signalized himself by success: but that surgeon, if he have not obtained the dexterity which ensures success, by dissecting and operating on the dead, must have acquired it by making experiments on the living bodies of the poor. There is no other means by which he can possibly have gained the necessary information. Every such surgeon who has attained deserved eminence, must have risen to it through the suffering which he has inflicted, and the death which he has brought upon hundreds of the poor. What would be the immediate and constant effect of an abolition of the practice of dissecting the dead? It would be to convert poor-houses and public hospitals into so many schools where the surgeons, by practising on the living bodies of the poor, would learn to operate on those of the rich with safety and dexterity. Thus the poor would be tortured, and many of them would be put to death in order that the rich might be saved from pain and danger. This would be the certain and inevitable result--this would indeed be to treat this class of the people with real indignity and horrible injustice, and proves how possible it is to show an apparent consideration for the poor, and yet practically to abuse them in the most cruel manner. The plan now proposed for remedying the evils which have been stated would accomplish the object easily and completely: it would inflict no injury on any private individual: it would do no violence to the public feeling: it would render the dread of anatomy, as far as that dread were really operative, directly beneficial to the community: it would terminate at once the evils of the present system: it would put an end to the education of daring and desperate violators of the law: it would tranquillize the public mind: the dead would rest undisturbed: the sepulchre would be sacred, and all the horrors which the imagination connects with its violation would cease for ever.