You would have thought this a sufficiently clear lesson, perhaps, upon the point that I am pressing into you. But it wasn't. And I remember consecrating a golden September in Fife to the mastery of my materia medica. There's a moor, for instance, somewhere between Dunfermline and Rumbling Bridge that will eternally be associated in my mind with the preparations of opium. I can recall in all its hideous detail some such afternoon's tramp as this:-- "By George, that's a fine piece of colouring, the sunlight on that dying heather over there, Tinct: Camph: Co: strength of opium one in two hundred and forty. There are the Ochils again, pil: plumbi cum opio, strength of opium one in eight---- Damn, I forgot to look for that big trout when I crossed the burn just now. Extractum opii, strength of opium two in one" (it sounds improbable--even theological--but if you look it up you will discover it to be correct, and I have never found the knowledge in the least important). And, as a result, that particular moor will always whisper to me unhealthily of morphia, while the preparations of opium had to be learned all over again in something less than six weeks' time. And you will generally find it to be the case, I think, that the work which has desecrated the holiday can seldom stand either the test of an examination or the more valuable one of practical appliance. For it's the term's work, the good, solid, everyday's grind in the dissecting-room or the physiological theatre, and later in the wards and the out-patient department, that is the bone and marrow of your pre-graduate education. Without it no amount of feverish cramming will ever make you efficient, though it may occasionally perhaps save you from being deservedly ploughed. And with it no cramming should be necessary--or at most a very little. For there are still a few subjects, alas, demanded by examining boards that can be learned, I suppose, in no other way--such as the preparations of opium before mentioned, with their respective strengths and all that appertains unto them, and the ingredients of various obscure powders that you will never hear about again. In after life you will always refer to your pharmacopeia if you want information upon these subjects, and no normal mind has either the capacity or the desire to retain their details for so long as twenty-four hours after they have been required in the examination-room.