The plan that Graves adopted and worked so successfully, essentially consisted in giving to the advanced students charge over particular patients, requiring them to report upon the origin, progress, and present state of their diseases. At the bedside these particulars were verified or challenged by the physician; and then in the lecture-room he discussed with the class the diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment of the cases. The pupil in charge prescribed for the patient, and his prescription was revised and corrected by the physician. The advantages of this system were obvious; students being obliged to give reasons for every plan of cure, became accustomed to a rational and careful investigation of disease, and enjoyed the great benefit of the early correction of their errors. Nevertheless the system met with much opposition, and even ridicule. As Stokes says, the student was then kept at a distance; no one cared to show him how to teach himself, to familiarise him with “the ways of the sick,” to train his mind to reason, and to inculcate the duty as well as the pleasure of original work. Graves had both knowledge and eloquence; his style was massive, nervous, and forcible; he could command the minds of his hearers, and he showed himself thoroughly in earnest. “His active mind was ever on the search for analogies, and thus he was led to the discrimination of things apparently similar, and to the assimilation of things at the first view dissimilar, in a degree hardly surpassed by any teacher of medicine.” Having been elected a Fellow of the King’s and Queen’s College of Physicians, Graves was subsequently appointed Professor of the Institutes of Medicine. In this capacity he gave lectures in which physiology was ably applied to the wants of medical students. In the years 1828-36 he contributed many physiological essays, chiefly to the _Dublin Journal of Medical Science_, of which he was one of the editors till his death, on such subjects as “The Distinctive Characters of Man,” “The Chances of Life,” “Temperament and Appetite,” “The Sense of Touch,” &c., all interesting. But it was not till 1843 that he published the work on which his reputation as an author chiefly rests, his “Clinical Lectures on the Practice of Medicine.” In relation to this one needs no higher authority in its favour than that of Trousseau, who addressed to the translator of the French edition a letter from which we make the following extracts.