No rich man has so silent and trustworthy a servant as the poor student in a good book of reference.

The wise physician treats the healing power of Nature as the sunflower the sun, he follows it till it becomes invisible. Let him who desires to secure valuable papers deposit them between the pages of the folio work of some pretended scholar. He may rely on no one disturbing them.

Nature deals with life, man alone honours the dead. When do we find in the wood or the field the preserved skeleton of an animal? The remnants of life disappear without a trace to serve for the maintenance of other life.

The faults of youth spring from mistaken opinions; the situations of life require, as they themselves do, to attain a certain degree of steadiness. They have no insight into the perfect organization of the positions in life. He who enters a diorama requires time to adapt his vision to the obscurity around him before he can be aware that he is standing amongst hundreds of other spectators.

The wounds which Destiny inflicts are simple and easily healed, i.e. incised wounds; on the contrary, those which man inflicts, are lacerated wounds, which close slowly and leave scars behind.

The most innocent and most thoughtful men smile much but laugh little.

Ugliness has this advantage over beauty, that it is not so transitory.

The greatest teachers of the physician, Nature and the ancients, are always young. Experience itself is an everspringing fountain.

Slander, like a breath on a mirror, obscures for a moment the image, rub it off, that image is all the brighter.

Many a one, dissatisfied with the surface of the busy present, would know what life conceals in its unknown depths; but he who, dissatisfied with the reflection of a mirror, goes behind it, sees nothing but his own blind folly.

A man hardened against changes of temperature does not easily take cold, but should he wander about clothed only in his virtue, he would certainly become rheumatic.

Dreams are metamorphoses of past reminiscences, representations of the present with the decorations of the past, discoloured leaves in the autumn of the wishes, shooting stars in the firmament of our consciousness.

The self-murderer must be judged of as one in delirium. Disgust of life, even to self-destruction, is a chronic or an acute disease, for which the right physician has not hitherto been found.

Truth makes men morally, medicine bodily, free.

Insensible natures are little affected by the active workings of life; hence they last the longer. The Siberian ice preserves the mammoth entire, even to the skin and hair, and has done so since the flood.

Noble is the medical profession in this view, that it gives so much opportunity to recompense evil with good, and to shame egotism if not to overcome it.

The art of discovering the curative rank of every remedy, and judiciously prescribing it, may be considered the heraldry of medicine.

Shade is the consequence of light being intercepted by some intervening object. He who has nothing remarkable in his life shines as an especial favorite of Apollo.

As the verdant meadow has the greatest charm for the eye, but the hay-field for the smell, so the actual present deed attracts most admiration, but the deed embalmed by death, the greater fame.

In highly-cultivated and noble-minded men, the chambers of the heart and brain are camera lucida, and the camera obscura of the eye reflects faithfully and beautifully the image of the world.

The Mind complains that Nature does not easily for

give. A good resolution cleanses the penitent soul, but poison taken into the body is not easily got rid of.

Much pain is taken to arrest the circulator of false coin. Why should not the same pains be taken to arrest the circulator of a false report? The word "devil" is etymologically equivalent to "slanderer."

Short illnesses, like short imprisonments, amend the life, long ones injure it.

Security in all situations of life depends on circumstances. So long as the rain pours down, a tree is a shelter, but as soon as the skies clear, the trees begin to rain from their leaves.

A memory which treasures up what has already been found injurious is the best of preservatives, and in many cases far more valuable than weighing sophistical reasonings.

The finest emblem and model of ceaseless activity is the beating of the heart. This organ is at once the strongest, the most perseveringly triumphant over difficulties, and the organ that least requires rest. When it ceases to work the life which it maintains ceases also.

A man may be known by his style. He stamps his internal image on it; but such a picture, faithful as it may be in resemblance, is but seldom successful and interesting.

Although many physicians are more friendly with death than is right towards the living, they are strangely neglectful of their departed great men. A medical Plutarch is yet a desideratum. A biography, or at least a defence of another's memory, resembles that last service of love, which amongst the Romans was rendered to the deceased, namely, driving away the flies from the face and hands.

The Heroes of the medical profession were for the most part noble men. What they did was more a question of conscience than of science. Medicine appeared with them to be a practical code of morals, and the physician resem

bled not merely a Brother of Mercy, but a Trappist digging the grave of his vocation by his efforts to exterminate disease.

As we call the air the pabulum vitæ, we may call sprightly humour, that ethereal spirit, the nourishment of the soul; but as some are susceptible of the least change in the atmosphere, so are weak minds unable to bear the light breezes of sprightliness,

A physician who writes anything but professional formularies makes himself conspicuous. Writings which are not clothed in the form of prescriptions will neither gain due consideration nor respect; such persons appear to disregard the warning of the god who stands beside Esculapius; for is not the finger which Telesphorus holds to his lips the writing finger?

The best regulation for the medical profession consists in dignified humanity: this will prescribe, in the simplest manner, its relation to the state, to science, to the public, and to the university. Pure morals, able qualifications, thorough cultivation, are the safest guides.

REMARKS ON THE LETTER TO THAER.

The Memoir we have given of Thaer will, we think, throw light on some of those passages in this interesting letter which, without it, would have been obscure.

The point which is set most prominently before us, in Thaer's history, is his relinquishment of his profession, a case which occurs, according to Marx, less frequently amongst medical men than in any other walk in life.

In detailing the causes which led to this result, our author's quotations seem calculated to convey an impression at first sight, which the life of Thaer, from which they are taken, does not bear out. They seem to intimate that

his dissatisfaction with medical life was owing, in part, at least, to the erroneous opinions entertained of him by others; but, in the life itself, we find that the passages quoted had reference to a much earlier period of his history. His biographer Körte lays down very clearly the motives which induced his gradual withdrawal from practice. These were: 1. His too great susceptibility of feeling. 2. His painful sense of the uncertainty of medical science. 3. His tendency to headache. Of the first and the last cause we need say little,—the former has been touched on in the letter to Hallé,—and, as to the latter, health, it is, of course, unanswerable; but, respecting the uncertainties of medical science we would offer a few remarks, and we shall begin by quoting a passage from Thaer's life, in addition to what we have already given in our biographical sketch.

"Theory appeared to him more and more a pretence of human intellect to render everything palpably clear to itself. On the contrary, he saw more and more how, on the other hand, practice exalted itself unbecomingly against theory, so that eminent physicians, and not merely common practitioners held theory almost for nothing, and consigned everything to the guidance of experience. He was compelled to recognize his age as a purely practical age, since even those physicians who allowed something to theory, did so rather to gain the reputation of learning, than to attain by it any better results. The most part held theory for nothing further than a popular fashion,-a pastime of leisure moments. Since two different diseases never discover themselves by the same symptoms, empiricism classes diseases by certain similar appearances. Now it is admitted that many different diseases are alike in * So Arnold says, "The philosophy of medicine, I imagine, is almost at zero; our practice is empirical, and seems hardly more than a course of guessing, more or less happy." See his letter to Dr. Greenhill,-Life, vol. ii.