Armed with these logical or methodical preliminaries, the student next attacks one of the extended treatises on the Practice of Medicine. He is now prepared to work the process of abstracting to the utmost advantage, both for clearness of understanding, and for impressing the memory. As in such a vast subject, no one author is deemed adequate to a full exposition, and as, moreover, a great portion of the information occurs, apart from systems, in detached memoirs or monographs,--the only mode of unifying and holding together the aggregate, is to reduce all the statements to a common form and order, by help of the pre-acquired plan. The progress of study may amend the plan, as well as add to the particular information; but absolute perfection in the scheme is not so essential as strict adherence to it through all the details. To work without a plan at all, is not merely to tax the memory beyond its powers, but probably also to misconceive and jumble the facts. * * * * * To enhance the illustration of the two main heads of the Art of Study, I will so far deviate from the idea of the essay, as to take up a special branch of education, which, more than any other, has been reduced to form and rule, I mean the great accomplishment of Oratory, or the Art of Persuasion. The practical Science of Rhetoric, cultivated both by ancients and by moderns, has especially occupied itself with directions for acquiring this great engine of influencing mankind. It was emphatically averred by the ancient teachers of the Oratorical art, that it must be grounded on a wide basis of general information. I do not here discuss the exact scope of this preparatory study, as my purpose is to narrow the illustration to what is special to the faculty of persuasion. I must even omit all those points relating to delivery or elocution, on which so much depends; and also the consideration of how to attain readiness or fluency in spoken address, except in so far as that follows from abundant oratorical resources. We thus sink the difference between spoken oratory, and persuasion through the press. Even as thus limited, oratory is still too wide for a pointed illustration: and, so, I propose farther to confine my references to the department of Political Oratory; coupling with that, however, the Forensic branch--which has much in common with the other, and has given birth to some of our most splendid examples of the art of persuasion.