they can out-manoeuvre the most consummate coquette of fifty! They perfect their education with almost the rapidity of light; and prattle most bewitchingly in French or Italian, before their pretty mouths have been sullied by their vulgar vernacular. The odious and despicable practice of knitting stockings and baking pies, fit only for a race of Goths in an age of Vandalism, has been inscribed with "_Ilium fuit_," and is now patronised only by the rustic _canaille_, who still adhere to the horrid custom of rising at the dawn of day and attending to household business. Their proficiency too, in the science of diacousticks, or the doctrine of sounds, is truly amazing--and the whole _posse comitatus_ of foreign fiddlers, jugglers, and mountebanks who kindly condescend to instruct them in music, (as they facetiously term it) are often thrown into raptures by the ease with which they produce every variety of noise on a piano, from the deafening roar of a northwester to the objurgatory grunt of a Virginia porker, unceremoniously ousted from his luxurious ottoman of mud! But, as Byron says, greater "than this, than these, than all," are the wonderful phenomena which have occurred in the science of medicine. The physicians of modern times, have snatched the imperishable laurels from the brows of Galen and Hippocrates, and have compelled Old Esculapius himself, to "hide his diminished head!" It had long been a source of the most poignant regret to the philanthropic observer of the ills and afflictions incident to human nature, that the benign system of medical jurisprudence, designed originally for the alleviation of human suffering, had been so dilatory and uncertain in its operation, and so fatally ill adapted to the eradication of numerous diseases from the human frame, as to effect only a partial accomplishment of its beneficent purpose. This radical disadvantage in that system of medical science, might reasonably have been attributed to the want of a proper firmness and adventurous temerity in its practitioners;--probably, also, it might have resulted from their lamentable ignorance of the structure and conformation of the human frame. This system, as was to have been expected, had met with numerous advocates, principally in consequence of their perfect personal indemnity from the frequently fatal result of their ignorance or mismanagement; it being well known that under this system a practitioner might, if he so chose, administer a deadly poison to his patient, who would naturally "shuffle off this mortal coil," while his afflicted relatives would piously attribute his decease to a dispensation of Providence; and the physician, composedly pocketing his fees, would have the satisfaction of seeing himself eulogised in his patient's obituary, as a man of "science and skill." It is obvious that under this system the patient's life was but "A vapour eddying in the whirl of chance,"