By the way, my reference to "the domestic stimulant" reminds me that on stimulants, domestic and other, this school of Physicians relied with an unalterable confidence. For a delicate child, a glass of port wine at 11 was the inevitable prescription, and a tea-spoonful of bark was often added to this generous tonic. In all forms of languor and debility and enfeebled circulation, brandy-and-water was "exhibited," as the phrase went; and, if the dose was not immediately successful, the brandy was increased. I myself, when a sickly boy of twelve, was ordered by a well-known practitioner, called F. C. Skey, to drink mulled claret at bedtime; and my recollection is that, as a nightcap, it beat bromide and sulphonal hollow. In the light of more recent science, I suppose that all this alcoholic treatment was what Milton calls "the sweet poyson of misused wine," and wrought havoc with one's nerves, digestion, and circulation. It certainly had this single advantage, that when one grew to man's estate, and passed from "that poor creature, small beer," to the loaded port and fiery sherry of a "Wine" at the University, it was impossible to make one drunk. And thereby hangs a tale. I was once writing the same sentiment in the same words for a medical journal, and the compositor substituted "disadvantage" for "advantage," apparently thinking that my early regimen had deprived me of a real happiness in after-life. Such were the Doctors of my youth. By no sudden wrench, no violent transition, but gently, gradually, imperceptibly, the type has transformed itself into that which we behold to-day. No doubt an inward continuity has been maintained, but the visible phenomena are so radically altered as to suggest to the superficial observer the idea of a new creation; and even we, who, as Matthew Arnold said, "stand by the Sea of Time, and listen to the solemn and rhythmical beat of its waves," even we can scarcely point with confidence to the date of each successive change. First, as to personal appearance. When did doctors abandon black cloth, and betake themselves (like Newman, when he seceded to the Church of Rome) to grey trousers? Not, I feel pretty sure, till the 'seventies were well advanced. Quite certainly the first time that I ever fell into the hands of a moustached Doctor was in 1877. Everyone condemned the hirsute appendage as highly unprofessional, and when, soon after, the poor man found his way into a Lunatic Asylum, the neighbouring Doctors of the older school said that they were not surprised; that "there was a bad family history"; and that he himself had shown marked signs of eccentricity. That meant the moustache, and nothing else. Then, again, when was it first recognized as possible to take a pulse without the assistance of a gold chronometer? History is silent; but I am inclined to assign that discovery to the same date as the clinical thermometer, a toy unknown to the Doctors of my youth, who,