Let us examine, therefore, a few of the possible advantages which a medical man might possess over the laity in these investigations. The life study of the physician is man; man in his entirety, man as an animal, man as a rational entity, man in relation to himself, and man in relation to his physical surroundings--air, earth, water, organic and inorganic nature. As physicians we behold man in embryo; we often hold in the palm of our hands the germ that had been quickened into a living soul. We subject it to optical glasses and study its physical mysteries. We watch it at every period of its intra-uterine life. We bring it ripe for a more exalted stage of activity into this breathing world. We study its growth and mark its development. We foster and protect it, until we behold the structure complete--a living man. We observe this being in health, and we minister to him in disease. We look into his eyes, that we may read the temper and pressure of his brain. We scan the optic discs, that we may measure the blood currents and detect unhealthful changes in the sensorium itself. We regard the face and note the emotions that sweep over it. We read upon its pallid surface the signs of agony, peace, fear, love, hope, despair, death. We read a history in the drooping of a lid, the compressed lip, the pinched nostril, or the tremor of a muscle. We feel the heart throb; we interrogate its action, we interpret its sounds. We place our ears upon the chest and tell you of life's breathing tide. We ask the blood its heat, and it records the answer. We bid the stomach, liver, kidneys, to bear us witness, and they respond at our bidding. As we behold the growth of mind with the body, so do we witness their decay. We study psychology in its various relations to physical disease. We see it infinitely manifested as physical decay encroaches upon its citadel. We study mental phenomena as the earliest precursor of physical death. We observe, study and interpret, mental phenomena as a most important aid to physical diagnosis. We begin this study in our student days, and we never cease this careful observation of mental phenomena. It yields to the medical man a full measure of practical benefits in the treatment of human maladies. The physician's life, then, is chiefly devoted to the special study of physical disease and mental manifestations in relation thereto. Will the jurist, yet assert that the man whose life is spent in the manufacture of shoes, the production of wheat, and the growth of four-footed beasts, is as competent to estimate the value and interpret the symptoms of diseased nerve centres as he, whose life has been spent in their special study? This assertion of legal gentlemen is too absurd for argument. I will remark, by way of a possible explanation for this curious belief, that the most learned alienists of this age declare that in general, the lawyers and jurists are as ignorant of insanity as the laity itself.