"Simplicity" has struck us as a feature which, in some sense or other, is very commonly defective. Simplicity appears so important, that perhaps, by not a very illegitimate extension of its meaning, it might be made to include almost all the requisitions of this mode of teaching. Let us think of it in relation to language and illustration. In all sciences, the _facts_ are simple; the laws are yet _more so_; increasing knowledge tends to impress on us an ever-increasing and comprehensive simplicity. In explaining simple things, no doubt language should be simple too. If we employ language unnecessarily technical, we use symbols to which the learner is unaccustomed. He has not to learn the facts _only_; but he has the _additional labour_ of something allied to learning it in a foreign language. The _unnecessary_ use of technicalities should then surely be avoided. Abernethy was obliged to use them, because there were often no other terms; but he always avoided any needless multiplication of them. When they were difficult or objectionable, he tried some manœuvre to lighten the repulsiveness of them. There are many muscles in the neck with long names, and which are generally given with important parts of surgical anatomy. Here he used to chat a little; he called them the _little_ muscles with the _long_ names; but he would add, that, after all, they were the best-named muscles in the body, because their names expressed their attachments. This gave him an excuse for referring to what he had just described, in the form of a narrative, rather than a dry repetition. Then, with regard to one muscle, that he wished particularly to impress, the name of which was longer than any of the others, he used to point it out as a striking feature in all statues; and then, repeating its attachments, and pointing to the sites which they occupied, say it was impossible to do so without having the image of the muscle before us. In other parts of the Lectures, he would accompany the technical name by the popular one. Thus he would speak of the pancreas, or sweetbread; cartilage, or gristle. Few people are aware how many difficulties are smoothed by such simple manœuvres. Nothing interests people so much as giving anything _positive_. We think it not improbable that many a man has heard a lecture, in which animals have been described with whose habits he had been perfectly familiar, without having recognized his familiar acquaintances in the disguise afforded by a voluminous Greek compound. Abernethy seemed always to lecture, not so much as if he was telling us what he _knew_, as that which _we_ did _not_ know. There was an absence of all display of any kind whatever.