is it possible for him to pursue physiology? I get every year those very elaborate reports of Henle and Meissner--volumes of, I suppose, 400 pages altogether--and they consist merely of abstracts of the memoirs and works which have been written on Anatomy and Physiology--only abstracts of them! How is a man to keep up his acquaintance with all that is doing in the physiological world--in a world advancing with enormous strides every day and every hour--if he has to be distracted with the cares of practice? You know very well it must be impracticable to do so. Our men of ability join our medical schools with an eye to the future. They take the Chairs of Anatomy or of Physiology; and by and by they leave those Chairs for the more profitable pursuits into which they have drifted by professional success, and so they become clothed, and physiology is bare. The result is, that in those schools in which physiology is thus left to the benevolence, so to speak, of those who have no time to look to it, the effect of such teaching comes out obviously, and is made manifest in what I spoke of just now--the unreality, the bookishness of the knowledge of the taught. And if this is the case in physiology, still more must it be the case in those branches of physics which are the foundation of physiology; although it may be less the case in chemistry, because for an able chemist a certain honourable and independent career lies in the direction of his work, and he is able, like the anatomist, to look upon what he may teach to the student as not absolutely taking him away from his bread-winning pursuits.