It is possible that each has in a degree cause for this, so far as he judges by his own experience. The one may have been brought in contact with that perfect surgeon--and there are many such--whose peculiar gifts for the calling were bestowed upon him by the Divine will; he with the lion's heart and woman's hand, whose success, born of patience, courage, judgment, experience, has become by God's blessing an assured fact. Men who have brought all the grand discoveries of earthly science to their aid and help in their study of the art; who have watched Nature day by day, and mastered her intricacies; who have, in fact, attained to that perfection in skill which induces the involuntary remark to break from us--We shall never see his fellow! Before such a man as this, as I look upon it, the world should bow. We have no benefactor like unto him. The highest honours of the land should be open to him; all that we can give of respect and admiration should be his. But there is a reverse side to the picture. There is the man who has gone into the profession without aptitude for it, who has made it his, although positively incapable of properly learning it and exercising it. He may have acquired the right to use all the empty distinguishing letters attaching to it, and tack them after his name on all convenient occasions, inscribe them in staring characters on his very door-posts--M.D., M.R.C.S.--as many more as there may be to get; but, for all that, he is not capable of exercising the art. His whole career is one terrible mistake. He kills more patients than he cures; slaying them, drenching them to death, with that most pitiful and fatal of all weapons--ignorance. It may not be his fault, in one sense: he does his best: but he has embraced a calling for which nature did not fit him. He goes on in his career, it is true, and his poor patients suffer. More ignorant, of necessity, than he is--for in all that relates to the healing art, we are, take us as a whole, lamentably deficient--they can only blindly resign themselves to his hands, and when they find that there's no restored health for them, that they get worse rather than better, they blame the obstinacy of the malady, not the treatment. Upon his own mind, meanwhile, there rests an ever-perpetual sense of failure, irritating his temper, rendering his treatment experimental and uncertain. Some cannot see where the fault lies--have no conception that it is in their own incapacity. And if a man does see it, what then? He must go on and do his best; he must be a doctor always; it is his only means of living, and he is too old to take to another trade. Rely upon it there are more of these practitioners than the world suspects.