Upon the contagiousness of Puerperal Fever, Doctor Holmes wrote an able treatise some forty years ago. This was reprinted with some additions, in 1855, and in an introductory note which accompanies the still later addition (1883), Doctor Holmes says, "The subject of this Paper has the same profound interest for me at the present moment as it had when I was first collecting the terrible evidence out of which, as it seems to me, the commonest exercise of reason could not help shaping the truth it involved. It is not merely on account of the bearing of the question--if there is a question--on all that is most sacred in human life and happiness that the subject cannot lose its interest. It is because it seems evident that a fair statement of the facts must produce its proportion of well-constituted and unprejudiced minds." The essay, a most valuable one, is republished without the change of a word or syllable, as the author upon reviewing finds that it anticipates and eliminates those secondary questions which cannot be for a moment entertained until the one great point of fact is peremptorily settled. There are but very few subjects, indeed, in medical science, that Doctor Holmes has not investigated, and investigated, too, most thoroughly.... In his article on "Reflex Vision," published in Volume IV. of the Proceedings of the American Academy, will be found a very interesting account of his experiments in optics. One, indeed, that will both interest and instruct. To him, as is well known, we are indebted for numerous improvements in the stereoscope; and in microscopes also, he has done some original and important work. Said an admirer of Doctor Holmes in referring to his career as a medical professor: "He always makes people attentive, and I have been told that there is no professor whom the students so much like to listen to. In one of his books he says that every one of us is three persons, and I think that if the statement is true in regard to ordinary men and women, Doctor Holmes himself is at least half a dozen persons. He lectures so well on anatomy that his students never suspect him to be a poet, and he writes verses so well that most people do not suspect him of being an authority among scientific men. Though he illustrates his medical lectures by quotations of the most appropriate and interesting sort, from a wonderful variety of authors, he has never been known to refer to his own writings in that way." In celebrating the silver anniversary year of his wedding with the Muse of the monthlies--meaning his reappearance in the _Atlantic_--he observed that during the larger part of his absence, his time had been in a great measure occupied with other duties. "I never forgot the advice of Coleridge," he said, "that a literary man should have a regular calling. I may say, in passing, that I have often given the advice to others, and too often wished that I could supplement it with the words, "And confine himself to it.'"