The medical, mark you, is the noblest of all professions. It contains many learned and able men who devote their lives unselfishly to the amelioration of human misery; but I much doubt whether one-half the M. D.'s now sending people to the drug stores with cipher dispatches, could tell what was the matter with a suffering mortal were he transparent as glass and lit up by electricity. There are doctors doping people with powerful drugs, who couldn't tell whether a patient had a case of cholera-morbus or was afflicted with an incurable itch for office--who have acquired their medical information from the almanacs and could not distinguish between a bunion and a stone-bruise or find the joints in a string of sausage with a search- warrant. I have noticed that when the doctors took to writing their prescriptions in Latin it quickly became a dead language--that when I take the poet's advice and throw physic to the dogs, their numbers rapidly decrease. But the doctors are jolly good fellows. Let it be recorded to their eternal credit, that, whatever may be their faults, precious few of them will practice in their own families. I have often wished that I was a doctor of medicine instead of a doctor of divinity. There are several fellows for whom I'd like to prescribe. There's a strong affinity between the two professions. The D. D.'s deal in faith and prayer, the M. D.'s in faith and pills. I have been frequently asked why, in lecturing on Humbugs, I skip the lawyers. There are some subjects to which a lecturer must lead up gradually; so I discuss the doctors in my discourse on Humbugs and save the attorneys for my talk on Gall.