Second, at the apertures of the two most important members of the outlook corps, the senses of sight and of smell. These are not only sharply alert to every external indication of danger, but by a curious reversal, which we will consider more carefully later, reflect signals of distress or discomfort from within. Last, but not least, the translucent tissues, the semi-transparent skin, barely veiling the pulsating mesh of myriad blood-vessels, is a superb color index, painting in vivid tints--"yellow, and ashy pale, and hectic red"--the living, ever changing, moving picture of the vigor of the life-centre, the blood-pump, and the richness of its crimson stream. Small wonder that the shrewd advice of a veteran physician to the medical student should be: "The first step in the examination is to look at your patient; the second is to look again, and the third to take another look at him; and keep on looking all through the examination." It is no uncommon thing for an expert diagnostician deliberately to lead the patient into conversation upon some utterly irrelevant subjects, like the weather, the crops, or the incidents of his journey to the city, simply for the purpose of taking his mind off himself, putting him at his ease, and meanwhile quietly deciphering the unmistakable cuneiform inscription, often twice palimpsest, written by the finger of disease upon his face. It takes time and infinite pains. In no other realm does genius come nearer to Buffon's famous description, "the capacity for taking pains," but it is well worth the while. And with all our boasted and really marvelous progress in precise knowledge of disease, accomplished through the microscope in the laboratory, it remains a fact of experience that so careful and so trustworthy is this face-picture when analyzed, that our best and most depended upon impressions as to the actual condition of patients, are still obtained from this source. Many and many a time have I heard the expression from a grizzled consultant in a desperate case, "Well, the last blood-count was better," or, "The fever is lower," or, "There is less albumen,--but I don't like the look of him a bit"; and within twenty-four hours you might be called in haste to find your patient down with a hemorrhage, or in a fatal chill, or sinking into the last coma. It would really be difficult to say just what that careful and loving student of the _genus humanum_ known as a doctor looks at first in the face of a patient. Indeed, he could probably hardly tell you himself, and after he has spent fifteen or twenty years at it, it has become such a second nature, such a matter of instinct with him, that he will often put together all the signs at once, note their relations, and come to a conclusion almost in the "stroke of an eye," as if by instinct, just as a weather-wise old salt will tell you by a single glance at the sky when and from what quarter a storm is coming.