sure to find it out in other ways. Also keep your business affairs and your money matters to yourself, and avoid the habit of talking to people about your collections, bills, etc.—unless it be to a person about his own bill-or you will surely get the reputation of thinking and talking more about the dirty dollar than anything else. If any one asks you: How is business? better to simply answer, "Oh, I am satisfied!"

As a physician, you will require a good address and varied talents, for you must come in contact with all kinds of people. An intelligent readiness in adapting yourself to all classes and conditions of life, sufficiently for the requirements of your profession, is an invaluable faculty, and one in which most regular physicians are very deficient.

When a patient, alarmed about his health, consults you, if you wish your opinion fully to satisfy him, be earnest, and let personal intentness to his case overshadow all that you say and do; and take especial care not to divert his conversation from himself to extraneous subjects. If it be at your office, do not digress by showing him your new works of art, or the toy steam-boat you are making, or by telling him the latest bits of news or gossip, or the history of the good cigar or fine pipe you are smoking, or of the newspaper or novel you are reading, or of the cane you are twirling. If he divert the conversation from his case, bring him back to it at the first opportunity, and know nothing but your professional duty.

In addition to professional knowledge, you should make yourself fairly conversant with general scientific subjects that tend to exercise the reason rather than the memory, and also with general and polite literature, that you may acquire ideas, nice discrimination of words, and improved power and facility of expression, and so put yourself on a conversational level with the cultured classes with whom you are likely to be brought in contact. In fact, among intellectual and educated people, good conversational powers and correctness and precision in

the use of words often actually produce a higher opinion of a physician's professional ability than is really possessed. Besides:

Wisdom is the sunlight of the soul,

and there is a perpetual delight in the possession of knowledge. Therefore keep your dictionaries and encyclopedias at your elbow; patronize them freely, and, when your reading or musing excites your curiosity on any subject, or in any direction, turn to them and be informed. They are both convenient and useful in looking up facts and meanings when you have but a few moments to devote to an inquiry, and will save you from many mistakes and uncertainties. Besides:

We live in thoughts, not breaths.

He most lives who thinks most.

One who can neither conjugate amo nor decline penna, nor even use his English grammar correctly, may reduce a dislocation, adjust a fracture, tie an artery, or prescribe a drug as skillfully as the Latinist can; yet a good (classical) education, with the scientific habit of thought, and the mental discipline, the fertility of ideas, the images, and the more distinct logical conceptions it creates or makes possible, although not indispensably necessary to the acquirement of skill, experience, and success as a physician, are powerful elements in the early professional struggle. Therefore, if luck has deprived you of a chance for education and you have consequently begun late in life, and are still defective in scholastic training, be not cast down, but think of the excellent motto of the Johns-Hopkins University:

The truth shall make you free.
(Veritas Vos Liberabit.)

and, to rid yourself of the charge of illiteracy, roll up your sleeves and go to work to make up the deficiency by dint of school-book study and self-education, as fully as possible:

Better late than never;

otherwise it will make you every year more and more ashamed of your want of knowledge, and either keep you hid among the nonentities of the profession and compel you to fight daily against the inadequacy of your imperfect education, or perpetually debar you from obtaining more than a limited elevation in it. Besides: Whenever you put pen or pencil to paper you cannot avoid offering yourself and your mental acquirements to every body for measurement.

Indeed, without adequate educational and other qualifications you can no more enjoy social or professional rank, or reach the eminence of scientific greatness, than a pigeon can fly upward with but one wing. The true secret is to be qualified for advancement; besides, without familiarity with the rules of English grammar and a fair education you will be painfully conscious of a great want, and will be continually exposed to ridicule for your ignorance, misapplication of words, vulgarisms, or gross grammatical errors by persons who are, perhaps, very much your inferiors in those great gifts of heaven,genius and sound sense,-and sometimes even be made to appear almost contemptible to yourself :—

Grammar violated and orthography murdered.

But while a physician cannot know too much, we strongly doubt the wisdom of frittering away, after practice is begun, a disproportionate amount of time on impractical frivolities or on speculative subjects and theories that cannot be applied, or giving them more time than recreative attention allows. Nor is it wise to devote special attention to the higher mathematics, the fine arts, the great classics, zoology, comparative anatomy, mineralogy, botany, Egyptology, geology, ornithology, conchology, or other collateral studies, while yet imperfect in the practical and essential principles of medicine, because simultaneous attention to multifarious subjects or scattering one's

energies through too broad a field prevents concentration of thought, and naturally divides and distracts the mind, and preventing one from pursuing the strictly needful studies with his full strength. In other words: Do not attempt to grasp more than you can hold, but pursue whatever you do undertake with zealous determination and continuity of effort:— To industry all things are possible.

aims The plan of forcing themselves tenaciously to pursue of a practical character constitutes the peculiarity of most men who rise above the ordinary level, or succeed in an eminent degree, to:—

Where fame's proud temple shines afar.

This is true not only in medicine, but also in any calling. We once knew a person who by accident lost his leg at the middle of the thigh; previous to this he was but an ordinary swimmer, but afterward his having only one leg attracted special attention to his swimming. Seeing himself thus observed stimulated him always to do his best, which made him more and more expert, until eventually he became the best swimmer we ever saw, because the most ambitious, as if:

A knowledge of Latin to even a limited extent is of inestimable value. If you are not a scholar, and have not had the advantage of embracing it in your early education, do not fail to employ some Latin scholar to teach you at least as much of the elements of Latin as you need in your practice; you can get one at a small cost by advertising anonymously in any daily paper. He can, with the aid of a Latin grammar and a Latin dictionary, teach you in a few winter evenings or summer afternoons sufficient of the rudiments and outlines of the Latin language to enable you to understand the etymological import

and pronunciation of words, phrases, and technical terms; also to know the case-endings and to write your prescriptions correctly, and thereby lift you above a feeling of abashment at your deficiency in this important particular, give you a constant sense of security, and afford you perpetual satisfaction. No difference how you get your wisdom, so you get it. Ability to write prescriptions in correct Latin will also naturally assist in creating respect for your academic and professional ability, or, rather, in preventing unfriendly criticism and disrespect in the minds of your fellow-physicians, the druggists, and others. Besides, all laymen presume that every physician understands Latin as part of his ordinary knowledge, and if they find him ignorant of this they naturally consider him to be equally so in other important requirements.

Many people imagine that we write prescriptions in Latin in order to conceal a secret. The true intent, however, is to give every article (and every quantity) a concise and specific title, and to point it out in such a manner that when we call for it in a prescription we may get it, and nothing else, thus making mistakes of meaning between the prescriber and the compounder impossible; besides, Latin is international, and the Latin names of drugs are the same all over the world and can be read by the scholars of all nations, while the common names, sugar of lead, laudanum, black wash, etc., are liable to differ with each nation and locality. Thus aqua is water in Baltimore, and is the same in Paris, in Calcutta, and in St. Petersburg. Latin is a dead language, belonging to no modern nation, and therefore fixed, and not subject to mutations; is not only perfectly accurate, but by long usage is in high repute. What good would a prescription written in English be in St. Petersburg, Warsaw, or Milan?

A rudimentary knowledge of Greek is also useful, as from it have been formed three-fourths of the compound terms employed in the medical and other sciences. Indeed, Latin