"By-the-way, Arthur is a noble fellow and an accomplished gentleman. He has all the prerequisites of natural capacity and elementary acquirements, for the study of his arduous profession. I know no young gentleman who has chosen a profession in every way better suited to his peculiarities of mind and temperament. You will doubtless recollect that he always had a fondness for the natural sciences, and this, after all, is the true 'condition precedent' for making a profound and philosophic physician. How lamentable it is that such minds are always thrown in the background in our colleges! This results from that everlasting _dingdong_ hammering at languages, before the pupil has discovered their uses, and without any regard to his peculiarities of mind. Those students who, like Arthur, exhibit an apt capacity for the study of things, and their properties and relations, are almost always dull at the study of their representatives, or, in other words, languages; why, then, do the instructers in these institutions destroy the energies and the vigour of such a mind, by making him fail at those things for which nature has disqualified him, or, rather, for which nature has too nobly endowed him? I am no enemy to the study of the vehicles by which we communicate with our fellow-men, but I am an enemy to the uniform, monotonous drilling, which all collegians in this country receive alike, because I have observed in this process, that third-rate minds invariably rank first. There are, in every college, numbers of young gentlemen who have parrot-like capacities, and memories that retain little words; but who, if required to originate ideas of their own, would soon show the native barrenness of their understandings. "Look around you now in the world, and see what has become of these _distinguished_ linguists! One out of a hundred, perhaps, has received a professorship in some new institution, and the others are all falsifying the promises of their precocious youth; while of the thoughtful and abstract dunces, as they were considered in college, many are building up lasting reputations, upon the deep and solid foundations which our hackneyed systems of education could not develop. Necessity and the world develop them; and these, we soon find, are very different from college life. Now, college discipline should imitate the world in this respect; it should develope every man's peculiar genius. Neglect of this is the true reason why so many men distinguish themselves in the world, who were considered asses in college, and why so many who were considered amazingly clever in college, are found to be little better than asses in the world.