It is true that medical practitioners, for reasons hereafter stated, are exempt from serving on juries, and are seldom charged with magisterial duties, at least till they have retired from the more active employment of their profession; it must be remembered, however, that they are charged with important and peculiar jurisdictions; and it is impossible to look at the various litigations which we have enumerated in the first part of our work, without feeling that every member of the medical colleges ought to possess some legal knowledge. Can the President and Censors of the College of Physicians execute their power of fine and imprisonment; can they restrain unlicensed intruders, or punish the bad practices of ignorant pretenders, without some study of the law? can they vindicate their rights without reference to the numerous acts of parliament on which they are founded? can they prove the guardians of the public health, without knowing the enactments by which it is protected? can they advise the legislative or executive power on numerous points submitted to their consideration, (as vaccine inoculation, quarantine, &c.) without understanding the bearings of the question referred to them? can they in fine do or advise any public act, without considering either the existing law as it may stand, or the policy and mode of future enactment? they may indeed state as much of the medical, chemical, or physiological facts of each case as their imperfect view may enable them to take; leaving it to the lawyer, who knows no physic, to correct the errors of the physician who knows no law. That acts of parliament have been framed on this principle of the mutual independence of law and science, it were vain to deny; but that they would have been better framed, if the parties employed in drawing them up had possessed some understanding in common on the subject before them, is equally indisputable. Let us therefore hope that, when our reader shall have considered the many points in which medicine and its branches may become auxiliary to legislation or government, he will feel convinced that legal studies are not useless to medical practitioners in their public capacity.