He made up his mind that when he had done all the work at the hospital he wanted to do, he would go out to his father, and spend a year or two with him before finally settling down to practice. CHAPTER II. THE SCHOOL OF ANATOMY. Foremost in the regal class Nature has broadly severed from her mass Of men....—_Browning._ Elsworth entered the profession of medicine with a large stock of a commodity just now rather out of fashion with our young men. This limp and degenerate age seems unable to supply our youth with backbone enough to make them enthusiasts about anything beyond dress, the Opera Comique, and the quality of their tobacco. They adopt a profession without at all intending it shall absorb them; they consider it a sign of weakness to show a consuming interest in great subjects, and their energies are frittered away on the most trivial concerns. How many men enter the Church, not as though Heaven-sent messengers, but as affording them a pleasant way of getting on in life! As for a message to mankind or a call from God, it would be too much in the way of the Methodists and Salvation Army people to be consistent with their notions of propriety. What they have to offer the world may be taken or left without interfering in the least with their peace of mind. Hence so many empty churches, while our courts and alleys are full of folk perishing for lack of knowledge which nobody is sufficiently interested to impart, except in a perfunctory manner. It may be all very well for good Mr. Spurgeon to be consumed with desire to save souls; that sort of thing may be consistent with life in the “region of the three D’s” (Dirt, Dissent, and Dulness), over the water. But fancy anybody in Pall Mall or the Row being “so dreadfully in earnest, don’t you know!” Such being too commonly the case with the Church, what can be expected of medicine? Inaugural addresses and the classic poets notwithstanding, it is rather too much, they say, to expect fellows in the nineteenth century to live up to an ideal guild of St. Luke. Now, by a beautiful instance of the law of compensation ever active in Nature, just as men are voting enthusiasm bad form, women are taking up the work men are too limp and too selfish to perform, and the spectacle is presented to the eye of hundreds of noble, clever, earnest, indefatigable women coming forward to fill the places which men decline, and leaving work more congenial to their habits and tastes, because men lack the energy and sympathy required to effect the necessary reforms. The salt of the earth is now fast becoming a feminine compound.