Of the apprentices, we shall say little more than to express our belief that many of them have lived to obtain the conviction that they would have done much better had they not been fed by hopes that were never realized. All apprentices cannot, of course, be surgeons. Again, if, in the course of a century, a solitary instance or two should occur of the success of an unapprenticed candidate, they not unnaturally feel it as an injustice in thus being deprived of that, the especial eligibility to which was a plea for the exaction of a large apprentice fee. But to the surgeons themselves, it seems to us that the system is far from realizing the benefits that its manifold evils are supposed to secure. The adage that "curses, like chickens, come home to roost," is far from inapplicable. After all, many of the hospital surgeons are little known; and the public inference with regard to men invested with such splendid opportunities of distinguishing themselves, is not very flattering. Mr. Abernethy, so far from benefiting from the "System," appears to us to have suffered from it in every way. His talents, both natural and acquired, would have given him every thing to hope and nothing to fear from the severest competition; whilst the positive effects of the system were such as to deprive him of what was justly his due, and to embitter a retirement which in the barest justice should have been graced by every thing that could add to his peace, his honour, or his happiness, from the Institution whose character he had exalted and maintained, and whose school he had founded. But let us look at the facts. The system which pronounces that there shall be three surgeons to attend to some 500 or 600 patients (_for the purposes of science_—the next thing to an impossibility), kept Abernethy twenty-eight years an assistant surgeon. During this time he was filling the hospital with students, to the amount of sums varying from £2,000 to £3,000 a year, of which, in the said twenty-eight years, he never received one farthing.