ce of modern society, as among the wild inhabitants of the
woods.

But, in addition to the bearing of science on ordinary practical life,
let me direct your attention to its immense influence on several of the
professions. I ask any one who has adopted the calling of an engineer,
how much time he lost when he left school, because he had to devote
himself to pursuits which were absolutely novel and strange, and of
which he had not obtained the remotest conception from his instructors?
He had to familiarize himself with ideas of the course and powers of
Nature, to which his attention had never been directed during his
school-life, and to learn, for the first time, that a world of facts
lies outside and beyond the world of words. I appeal to those who know
what Engineering is, to say how far I am right in respect to that
profession; but with regard to another, of no less importance, I shall
venture to speak of my own knowledge. There is no one of who may not at
any moment be thrown, bound and foot by physical incapacity, into the
hands of a medical practitioner. The chances of life and death for all
and each of us may, at any moment, depend on the skill with which that
practitioner is able to make out what is wrong in our bodily frames,
and on his ability to apply the proper remedy to the defect.

The necessities of modern life are such, and the class from which the
medical profession is chiefly recruited is so situated, that few medical
men can hope to spend more than three or four, or it may be five, years
in the pursuit of those studies which are immediately germane to physic.
How is that all too brief period spent at present? I speak as an old
examiner, having served some eleven or twelve years in that capacity in
the University of London, and therefore having a practical acquaintance
with the subject; but I might fortify myself by the authority of the
President of the College of Surgeons, Mr. Quain, whom I heard the other
day in an admirable address (the Hunterian Oration) deal fully and
wisely with this very topic[3].

A young man commencing the study of medicine is at once required to
endeavour to make an acquaintance with a number of sciences, such as
Physics, as Chemistry, as Botany, as Physiology, which are absolutely
and entirely strange to him, however excellent his so-called education
at school may have been. Not only is he devoid of all apprehension of
scientific conceptions, not only does he fail to attach