recognised as a _minimum_ qualification by all the diplomatising bodies. Indispensable, however, as this may seem, years of endeavour have failed to attain it. What is called _medical reform_ has been agitated longer than I can remember; and more than one minister has been willing to legislate for its promotion. Unfortunately the very magnitude of the evils has delayed their cure. With the constitution I have described--a system of conflicting jurisdictions, of licences without titles, and titles without licences, how could we escape internal dissension? how escape the antagonism, perhaps the jealousies, of rival corporations and of different professional classes? Home-Secretaries have had little leisure to fathom these things to the bottom. Unexamined and unadjudicated by any competent authority, such influences have bewildered public judgment, made statesmen regard us with despair, postponed legislative correction, and maintained us in a state of anarchy and confusion, best to be appreciated when we compare with our own the organisation and government of the legal profession. [6] Legislative passiveness towards scientific medicine is not the only evil we have to complain of. Surely, in selling Letters Patent for the protection of quack-medicines--in seeming to sanction and authenticate whatever lies their proprietor may post upon the wall, the State demeans itself into complicity with fraud, and soils its fingers with something fouler than the Vespasian tax. It illustrates the curious _forgetfulness_ shewn towards medicine by the Legislature, that this immoral practice of giving patents for pretended cures of disease should have been allowed to continue--as of course it must have continued, solely by oversight, till past the middle of the nineteenth century.