fe, in every age and every country, not even excepting
the much-lauded men of Great Britain and the continent of Europe. What
young lawyer is entrusted with an important cause immediately after
admission to the Bar? And as the young doctor (according to the
aforesaid showing) "gains his first practical knowledge while serving
as a hospital resident, under the supervision of experienced men,"
so the young lawyer, _even in Great Britain_, must gain _his_ first
practical knowledge by constant attention at the courts, and by
diligently following the proceedings of his preceptor's and other
offices. Even the young clergyman, whose business it is to save
_souls_, has to do very much as the young doctor does, and, like him,
is often "thrown at once on his own resources, gaining his experience
without supervision, and at the _expense_ of the _poorer classes_,
who _naturally_ fall to his charge, and whose ignorance precludes them
from an even approximately correct estimate of" his fitness. "It is
one of the saddest features of our system that the famed skill of our
best" _(clergymen)_ "should so often be acquired at such a cost."

What can be more unphilosophical and illogical than to compare the
young doctor, or any other young professional man, to a new piece of
machinery, fresh from the manufactory, complete and perfect in all
its parts? And yet something like this is _attempted_ in the article
before us. Even as Minerva sprang from the brain of Jove the complete
and perfect goddess of learning, so would our Utopian writer have
the young doctors to come from the brains of their medical professors
complete and perfect; only, if his idea be correct, their medical
professors have so little brains that the annual graduating medical
classes of the United States would be immediately reduced from
the frightful army of three thousand "legalized murderers" to the
comparatively small and easily counted number of _one graduate_ (of
course, springing from one head). No; the young doctor, at graduation,
cannot be compared to a new, complete and perfect machine fresh from
the manufactory; rather, let him be compared to the young marsupial
creature at birth, extremely rudimentary, whose natural, and hence
fittest, place is the parental pouch, but which in due time becomes
the vigorous and well-developed specimen. I suppose, if I compare
the young doctor to the young marsupial, I should also say that _his_
protecting parental pouch, in which