The digression I spoke of just now, is not the foolish trifle that ended with the last paragraph, and which the grave critic, to whom all mirth is unseasonable, will think very impertinent; but a serious apologetical one I am going to make out of hand, to clear myself from having any design against arts and sciences, as some heads of colleges and other careful preservers of human learning might have apprehended, upon seeing ignorance recommended as a necessary ingredient in the mixture of civil society. In the first place, I would have near double the number of professors in every university of what there is now. Theology with us is generally well provided, but the two other faculties have very little to boast of, especially physic. Every branch of that art ought to have two or three professors, that would take pains to communicate their skill and knowledge to others. In public lectures, a vain man has great opportunities to set off his parts, but private instructions are more useful to students. Pharmacy, and the knowledge of the simples, are as necessary as anatomy or the history of diseases: it is a shame, that when men have taken their degree, and are by authority intrusted with the lives of the subject, they should be forced to come to London to be acquainted with the Materia Medica, and the composition of medicines, and receive instructions from others that never had university education themselves; it is certain, that in the city I named, there is ten times more opportunity for a man to improve himself in anatomy, botany, pharmacy, and the practice of physic, than at both universities together. What has an oil shop to do with silks; or who would look for hams and pickles at a mercers? Where things are well managed, hospitals are made as subservient to the advancement of students in the art of physic, as they are to the recovery of health in the poor. Good sense ought to govern men in learning as well as in trade: no man ever bound his son apprentice to a goldsmith to make him a linen draper; then why should he have a divine for his tutor to become a lawyer or a physician? It is true, that the languages, logic and philosophy, should be the first studies in all the learned professions; but there is so little help for physic in our universities that are so rich, and where so many idle people are well paid for eating and drinking, and being magnificently, as well as commodiously lodged, that bar books, and what is common to all the three faculties, a man may as well qualify himself at Oxford or Cambridge to be a Turkey merchant, as he can to be a physician; which is, in my humble opinion, a great sign that some part of the great wealth they are possessed of is not so well applied as it might be.