the church-bell to toll, they find themselves puzzled and bewildered, a physician or a surgeon is called in, and too frequently these practitioners are bound by tacit agreement not to diminish the revenue that the shop produces. If it were necessary to prove the evils that result from the monopolizing powers vested in corporate institutions, the proof might be sought and found in the virulence and jealousy which they evince in resisting reform, from whatever quarter it may be dreaded; and it may be said that too many of the practising apothecaries of the present day stand in the same relative situation in the medical profession as the barbers of olden times. This faculty of exercising every branch of the profession, however qualified, is of olden date, and we find on the subject the following lines in the writings of Alcuin in the time of Charlemagne: Accurrunt medici mox Hippocratica tecta: Hic venas findit, herbas hic miscet in olla; Ille coquit pultes, alter sed pocula perfert. ON DREAMS. Philosophical ingenuity has long been displayed in the most learned disquisitions in an endeavour to account for the nature of these phenomena. The strangeness of these visionary perturbations of our rest--their supposed influence on our destinies--their frequent verification by subsequent events--have always shed a mystic _prestige_ around them; and superstition, ignorance, and craft, have in turns characterized them as the warnings of the Divine will, or the machinations of an evil spirit. Macrobius divided them into various categories. The first, the mere _dream_, _somnium_, he considers a figurative and mysterious representation that requires to be interpreted. Dion Cassius gives an example of this in the case of Nero, who dreamt that he saw the chair of Jupiter pass into the palace of Vespasian, which was considered as emblematical of his translation to the empire.