It might well be thought that men living so far apart from the general paths, and pursuing purposes so remote from those of the trader, would become obnoxious to that bitterest of American reproaches, the charge of being unpractical. The directness of aim of scientific training and the lofty code of honor among students of science, with their fair share of cis-Atlantic pliability, makes them, however, most useful and trustworthy people whenever it becomes requisite to entrust to them the mixture of commercial and scientific labor which is needed by heads of boards of weights and measures, of lighthouses, of coast surveys, and for the affairs and mere business conduct of societies and colleges or museums. Indeed, as regards this kind of work, they have too much of it--too much of that sort of labor which in England is well and wisely done by wealthy aristocrats who are amateurs in science or eager to find work of some kind. The popular opinion certainly conceives of the man of true science as being almost unfit for the practical every-day duties which bring him into working contact with his fellow-men. This is, as it were, a reversed form of the prejudice which believes that a physician or a lawyer will be a worse doctor or advocate because he writes verses or amuses an hour of leisure by penning a magazine article. As regards medicine, this popular decree is swiftly fading, though it still has some mischievous power. It was once believed, at least in this country, that a doctor should be all his life a doctor, and nothing else: the notion still lingers, so that young medical men who at the outset of their career seek to become known as investigators in any of the sciences related to medicine are, I fear, liable to be looked upon by many older physicians, and by a part of the lay public, as less likely than others to attain eminence in the purely practical part of medical life. It is time that this phantom of vulgar prejudice faded out. "Whatever you do," said a late teacher of physiology in my presence to a young doctor, "do not venture to become an experimental physiologist--that is, if you wish afterward to succeed as a doctor. It is fatal to that. It is sure to ruin you with the public." Yet Brodie, Cooper, Erichson and many others so employed their earlier years of leisure, and I might point in this country to some noble instances of like success in practice following upon careers which at first were purely scientific. But, in truth, every physician is more or less an investigator, and those who have been early trained to the sternly accurate demands of work in the laboratory of the experimental physiologist are only the better fitted for study at the bedside.