My worthy and approved good master, said I, have you lost all recollection of an old pupil? There was formerly one Gil Blas, as you may remember, a boarder in your house, and for some time your deputy. What! is it you, Santillane? answered he, with a cordial embrace. I should not have known you again. It, however, gives me great pleasure to see you once more. What have you been doing since we parted? Doubtless you have made medicine your profession. It was very strongly my inclination so to do, replied I; but imperious circumstances made me reluctantly abandon so illustrious a calling. So much the worse, rejoined Sangrado: with the principles you sucked in under my tuition, you would have become a physician of the first skill and eminence, with the guiding influence of heaven to defend you from the dangerous allurements of chemistry. Ah, my son! pursued he with a mournful air, what a change in practice within these few years! The whole honor and dignity of the art is compromised. That mystery by whose inscrutable decrees the lives of men have in all ages been determined, is now laid open to the rude, untutored gaze of blockheads, novices, and mountebanks. Facts are stubborn things; and ere long the very stones will cry aloud against the rascality of these new practitioners: _lapides clamabunt!_ Why, sir, there are fellows in this town, calling themselves physicians, who drag their degraded persons at the _currus triumphalis antimonii_, or, as it should properly be translated, the cart's tail of antimony. Apostates from the faith of Paracelsus, idolaters of filthy _kermes_, healers at haphazard, who make all the science of medicine to consist in the preparation and prescription of drugs! What a change have I to announce to you! There is not one stone left upon another in the whole structure which our great predecessors had raised. Bleeding in the feet, for example, so rarely practised in better times, is now among the fashionable follies of the day. That gentle, civilized system of evacuation, which prevailed under my auspices, is subverted by the reign of anarchy and emetics, of quackery and poison. In short, chaos is come again! Every one orders what seems good in his own eyes; there is no deference to the authority of ancient wisdom; our masters are laid upon the shelf, and their axioms not one tittle the more regarded for being delivered in languages as defunct as the subjects of their application.