At last, in the year 1505, barbers were dignified with the name of surgeons. Their instructions were delivered in their vernacular tongue, until the university again interfered, and ordered that lectures should be delivered in Latin; once more closing alma-mater against illiterate shavers, who were, however, obliged to give a smattering of classical education to their sons destined to wield alternately the razor and the lancet. In 1655, surgeons and barber-surgeons were incorporated in one college; a union which was further confirmed, in 1660, by royal ordonnance, under some limitations, whereby the barbers should not assume the title of licentiates, bachelors, or professors, nor be allowed to wear the honourable gown and cap that distinguished the higher grades of learning. Red caps were in former times given by each barber to his teacher on his being qualified, and gloves to all his fellow-students. Thus we find that the high state of perfection which the surgical art has attained is solely due to the efforts of industry to free itself from the ignoble trammels of bigotry and prejudice. Intellectual progress has invariably been opposed in every country by those powerful and interested individuals who derived their wealth and influence from the ignorance of society. Corporate bodies monopolizing the exercise of any profession will invariably retard instruction and shackle the energies of the student. It is, no doubt, indispensable that the practice of medicine in all its branches should only be allowed to such persons as are duly qualified; but whenever pecuniary advantages are derived from the grant of the permission, abuses as dishonourable as they are injurious to society will infallibly prevail. In Great Britain the period of study required in medical candidates is by no means sufficient. Five or six years is the very lowest period that should be insisted on; and, when duly instructed, degrees and licences should be conferred without fee, on all applicants, by a board of examiners unprejudiced and disinterested. This mode of granting licences would add to the respectability of the profession, while it would ensure proper attendance to the public. Physicians and surgeons would then become (what to a certain extent the latter are at present, though illegally as far as the laws of the college go), general practitioners, and society would no longer be infested by the swarms of practising apothecaries, who, from the very nature of their education, can only be skilled in making up medicines, or who must have obtained experience in the lessons taught by repeated failures in their early practice, unless perchance they have stepped beyond the usual confined instruction of their class. The consequences that arise from this fatal system are but too obvious. These men live by selling drugs, which they unmercifully supply, to the material injury of the patient's constitution. If, after ringing all the changes of their materia medica without causing