any meaning to
the words "matter," "force," or "law" in their scientific senses, but,
worse still, he has no notion of what it is to come into contact with
nature, or to lay his mind alongside of a physical fact, and try to
conquer it, in the way our great naval hero told his captains to master
their enemies. His whole mind has been given to books, and I am hardly
exaggerating if I say that they are more real to him than Nature. He
imagines that all knowledge can be got out of books, and rests upon the
authority of some master or other; nor does he entertain any misgiving
that the method of learning which led to proficiency in the rules of
grammar, will suffice to lead him to a mastery of the laws of Nature.
The youngster, thus unprepared for serious study, is turned loose among
his medical studies, with the result, in nine cases out of ten, that the
first year of his curriculum is spent in learning how to learn. Indeed,
he is lucky, if at the end of the first year, by the exertions of his
teachers and his own industry, he has acquired even that art of arts.
After which there remain not more than three, or perhaps four, years for
the profitable study of such vast sciences as Anatomy, Physiology,
Therapeutics, Medicine, Surgery, Obstetrics, and the like, upon his
knowledge or ignorance of which it depends whether the practitioner
shall diminish, or increase, the bills of mortality. Now what is it but
the preposterous condition of ordinary school education which prevents a
young man of seventeen, destined for the practice of medicine, from
being fully prepared for the study of nature; and from coming to the
medical school, equipped with that preliminary knowledge of the
principles of Physics, of Chemistry, and of Biology, upon which he has
now to waste one of the precious years, every moment of which ought to
be given to those studies which bear directly upon the knowledge of his
profession?

There is another profession, to the members of which, I think, a certain
preliminary knowledge of physical science might be quite as valuable as
to the medical man. The practitioner of medicine sets before himself the
noble object of taking care of man's bodily welfare; but the members of
this other profession undertake to "minister to minds diseased," and, so
far as may be, to diminish sin and soften sorrow. Like the medical
profession, the clerical, of which I now speak, rests its power to heal
upon its knowledge of the order of t