"That which charms our soul to sympathy, and fixes our interest, is the perception and the proof of the manner in which mankind, either in their collective mass, or in their individual branches, have advanced in the knowledge of the better, noble, and more perfect; how every step of their seeking, longing, and striving resembles the knots in the stem of a plant which, one following the other, become ever closer together till the fragrant flower is developed. The exhibition of one of life's sparks flashing out of antiquity, kindles the genial warmth in our own bosoms to a brighter glow; whilst the mere sight of the dead husks and limbs of the past, affects us with a cold shudder. So confront the wanderer in Egyptian plains, the pyramids, those stony pillars of the waste, once the signs of an active existence. Meanwhile the mere effusions of ideality will not suffice in history; it needs a firm and broad basis.

"He who does not withdraw himself for many years into independent deep study, exercising a high degree of self-denial, so as to sink himself entirely in his object, will never create anything original. With the diving-bell of indefatigable industry must he bring up hidden treasures from the sunken vessel, and with a true Moses' staff of penetrating judgment strike out flowing fountains from the rocks of recorded facts.

"It is to use the fountain when we appropriate the knowledge of the best of all times, dealing exclusively with the models and masterpieces of literature, perfectly acquainting ourselves with them on every side, and avoiding what they merely prepared for others. The gleaning of the stubble belongs to the poor after the harvest. Bad and inferior writers are in like manner shallow springs, which shine in the distance like fresh fountains, but when we would draw from them, they are quickly dried up.

"He who drudges over history is no more an historian than he who collects together mere notices of books and

old editions is a literary man. There is needed in this department an enlightened command of the materials collected, a free independent judgment, and an impartiality as to character. There is a great difference between him who writes a dispatch and him who transcribes it.

"Every one knows that, since the year 1817, hundreds of pamphlets and larger works have appeared on the cholera, which, in a very small degree, correspond with the requirement of Thucydides 'perpetual lastingness.' Should any one, after some centuries, collect together the existing pamphlets of these authors, would the cause of science and truth be thereby served? The number of writings in which clear conceptions of that disease, authentic facts, and certain leading reasonings are laid down, is astonishingly small.

66

According to the proverb, quisquis præsumitur bonus, every one who has printed is esteemed honorable in the book world, but an honorable author, who never permits himself to garble or insert portions of another's property without open acknowledgment, is not very common. Cuvier* says of Corvisart on that head, he gave a proof of noble magnanimity, because he translated Avenbrugger's Dissertation,' instead of giving its contents to the world as his own discovery.†

"The works of him who merely strives after a name, unembarrassed about the intrinsic worth of his performance, resemble those winter brocoli at Rome which smell of the

* Eloges, Hist. III, p. 372. "La forme donnée à cet ouvrage doit être remarquée comme la preuve d'une noble générosité. M. Corvisart y immolait sa gloire."

+ Corvisart expresses himself thereupon (in his translation and correction): "Je pouvais sacrifier le nom d'Avenbrugger à ma propre vanité; je ne l'ai pas voulu; c'est lui, c'est sa belle et légitime découverte que je veux faire revivre." (See also Pariset, Eloge de Laennec Hist. des Membres de l'Acad. Royale de Méd., tom. ii.)

manure, by means of which an indiscreet gardener has forced them into unseasonable maturity.

"It is not more indispensable to have competent talents one's self, than it is to estimate conscientiously the talents of others. The old proverb 'throw not a stone into the fountain from which thou hast drunk,' does not go far enough, for the benefit of an idea ready discovered for us, for a noble feeling excited, for important instruction furnished, demands our sincere gratitude, and to show it both in word and deed is an obligation and respect due to the author.*

"You will allow that every physician is so far an historian that he must note the history of disease and its treatment. From the past he must form his conception of the present, and out of many individual facts he must form an image of the probable. He also well knows that the opera omnia of a man are not his best; there are many which cannot be too soon got rid of and forgotten. Many are accustomed to invest with full biographical dignity all the relics of childhood, even to preserve the dried umbilical cord and the genuine infantile wrappings, as if from such mum

* On this point Walter Savage Landor (see his 'Imaginary Conversations of Literary Men,') speaks admirably. (London, 1826, 8, vol. i, p. 74.) "If the ear is satisfied; if at one moment a tumult is aroused in the breast, and tranquillised at another, with a perfect consciousness of equal power exerted in both cases; if we rise up from the perusal of the work with a strong excitement to thought, to imagination, to sensibility; above all, if we sat down with some propensities toward evil, and walk away with much stronger toward good, in the midst of a world which we never had entered, and of which we never had dreamed before, shall we perversely put on again the old man of criticism, and deny that we have been conducted by a most beneficent and most potent genius? Nothing proves to me so manifestly in what a pestiferous condition are its lazarettos, as when I observe how little has been objected against those who have substituted words for things, and how much against those who have reinstated things for words.”

mies of an early age the character and aims of the fullgrown man could be gathered.

"From a similar reverence for antiquity springs the zeal of many editors of celebrated works in collecting together every shred of what an author has written. They do not consider that the contents of such complete works are, in fact, incomplete, because they disturb and unsettle the comprehensive idea which one already entertains of a writer's genius and labours.

"To prevent personality I have sought to avoid all near allusions, at the risk, however, of becoming thereby unintelligible.

"Since, nevertheless, in your world of shadows our literary movements are probably portrayed as in a camera obscura, you are certainly in a position conveniently to observe with a glance what a weak son of earth can scarcely make out with all the united powers of his eyes, body, and mind."

REMARKS ON THE LETTER TO DR. LETTSOM.

The principal topic of this letter is history-medical history and biography,—and the qualifications necessary in a good historical writer. Many valuable and interesting observations are interspersed throughout. Of the history of medicine Professor Marx says, that it is still a desideratum, and on this subject there are some important suggestions in the work of Dr. Simon. After stating his opinion that the thoughtful study of history would be the best preservative against medical scepticism, he adds, “On this account we cannot too much encourage those works whose object is this important study. But to attain it something is needed beyond that learning which is but Galen and Hippocrates in the twentieth dilution. In order that the history of medical tradition may preserve over the mind that happy influence of which we are speaking, his

tory ought to be treated according to the method which M. Dezeimeris has briefly hinted in his 'Lettres Historiques,' but which, unfortunately, he only applied to certain isolated points of science. Up to the present time the historians of medical science, Freind, Leclerc, Schulze, Bernier, Ackermann, and Kurt Sprengel himself, who lays down formally the opinion that the history of medicine ought to be written in chronological order, all the historians of the science have, in fact, followed this order. But the plan is a vicious one; it leads to bibliography and biography; it leaves out a great number of truths which find no place in theories; it does not write the real intrinsic history of that science, which according to the expression of the learned librarian of the Faculty of Paris, marches across the succession of time. This is, however, the end which ought to be proposed; it is necessary that the historian should make it his object to show us the science in its progressive evolution, that every truth disengaged from the clouds which obscure it should show itself triumphant, and set free from all connexion with error. The medical man who should accomplish this grand work would, without doubt, render to art and science a most important service. It would be the precise inventory of the real property of each. Every theoretical conception would be obliged to conform itself to these primary truths, under pain of being suspected of error, or of being at once rejected as false. The most subordinate understandings, assimilating by an easy labour these truths divested of all the dress of human logic, would be protected for ever from that superficial scepticism into which they of all others are in danger of falling. Science would progress, art would progress, for neither has reached its climax, but they would at least be preserved from those perilous crises in which they seem to disappear."

Marx says every physician is so far an historian that he