this change, whilst, as was natural, it has shown its effects most distinctly and most clearly in the refinements and luxury, the increased comforts and extended spheres of enjoyment of the richer classes of the community, it has also, in a very evident manner, operated to the advantage and amelioration of the poorer section of the community. Better markets are open to the poor man, in which he can sell and buy-cheaper modes of transit are at his command-the laborer can now pass from place to place at speed never dreamed of by George the Fourth, who ever loved to, as he fancied it, fly along between Brighton and London, at the rate of twelve miles in the hour. The comforts and appliances of science are all extended to the poor man now, and the beggar in the public hospital has more chances of recovery, and is certain to suffer less pain, than the richest and most powerful monarch who tossed upon a sick bed two hundred years ago. As Macaulay truly writes, Every bricklayer who falls from a scaffold, every sweeper of a crossing who is run over by a carriage, now may have his wounds dressed, and his limbs set with a skill such as, a hundred and sixty years ago, all the wealth of a great lord like Ormond, or of a merchant prince like Clayton, could not have purchased."*

It is to be regretted that some member of the medical profession, with ability, learning, and practice in writing like Copeland, or Corrigan, or Taylor, or Wilde, has not devoted some portion of his time to composing the history of the progress of medical science. Few subjects are more important, and, if properly arranged, it could be made interesting as Whewell's Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, or useful as Mackintosh's Dissertation on the Progress of Ethical Philosophy. Within the last three hundred years the advances in Medicine and Surgery have been most remarkable. By a decree of Boniface the VIII. all persons taking bodies from the grave were declared excommunicated, and anatomy was pronounced abominable in the sight of God and man. Surgery, through the prohibition of the church, was like money-lending, through the prohibition of receiving interest, confined solely, in its higher branches, to the Jews. The Jews were pronounced impious, and medicines received through their prescriptions declared accursed, and by a decree of the council of Lateran, the physicians were directed, under heavy penalties, to require that the patients should receive the sacraments of penance and the eucharist, before medicine could be prescribed for themthus it was supposed that the Jewish physicians would be readily discovered, as through bigotry they would refuse to obey this direction. The prescriptions were curious, but amongst the most strange of all was that commonly known as the Doctrine of Signatures-that is, certain herbs and plants were presumed useful in curing those parts of the human body to which they bore, or were fancied to bear, a resemblance. Capillary

That the nation has thus advanced is evident to every thinking man; but progress has brought with it evils, great, palpable, and terrible. The steam-ship, the railway, the fac

herbs were good in diseases of the hair. Wallnuts were presumed to be a sovereign cure in all diseases of the head, from the great resemblance between them and that portion of the human frame-the green covering of the outer husk, represented the pericranium, and salt made of the husk was good for injuries to the outside of the head. The soft inner shell was like the skull and the thin yellow skin was like the dura and the pia mater. The kernel was so like the brain that it must of necessity be a perfect remedy for all diseases or injuries of that organ. William Coles the herbalist writes, that the "Lily of the Valley is good to cure the apoplexy, for as that disease is caused by the dropping of humours into the principal ventricles of the brain, so the flowers of this lily hanging on the plants as if they were drops, are of wonderful use herein." Kidney beans, from their perfect resemblance to the kidneys, were considered of great service in all urinary diseases. The yellow and purple spots upon the flowers Eye-bright, resembling the marks upon diseased eyes, the flowers were esteemed most efficacious in curing these disorders. Thistles and Holly, from their stinging the hand which touched them, were believed to be useful in curing the pricking pains of pleurisy, and the Saxifrage, from the manner of its growth, was esteemed a most powerful dissolvent of the stone. And because the cones of the pine tree resembled the front teeth, a gargle of vinegar in which they had been boiled was classed as a most efficacious remedy for the toothache. But the Doctrine of Signatures was surpassed in its absurdity by the remedies and ingredients prescribed for the cure of diseases generally.-For consumption, pills of powder of pearls and white amber were prescribed; for this disease and also for dropsy, water distilled from a peck of garden snails and a quart of earth worms was good, and cockwater was also recommended and was made from the water in which a cock that had been chased, beaten, and plucked alive, had been boiled. For broken bones, the oil of swallows was prescribed; this was made by pounding twenty live swallows in a mortar; a grey eel with a white belly, closed in an earthen pot, and buried alive in a dunghill, gave forth an oil which was good for the hearing; but the water of man's blood was the most famous and expensive of all the old remedies, and in the time of Queen Elizabeth was "an invention whereof some princes had very great estimation." To make it a strong man of a warm nature, and twenty-five years old, was to be selected and well dieted for a month with meat, spices and wine; when the month had elapsed, veins in both his arms were to be opened and as much blood as he could bear taken from him. One handful of salt was to be added to six pounds of the blood, and this was to be seven times distilled, water being each time poured upon the residuum. This was to be taken three or four times a year, in doses of an ounce at a time-health and strength were supposed to be transferable by means of this mixture. May not the doctrine of transfusion have its origin in this custom?

The practice of surgery was still more curious. It was necessary that a dangerous and difficult operation should be performed on Louis XIV., and several men afflicted with a like disease were carried to the house of Louvois the Minister, where the chief surgeon Felix operated upon them before Fagon, the physician of the King. Most of those operated on died; and that the King might know nothing of his dangerous condition,

tory-engine, the printing-press, have, with the blessed influences which they spread around, been, like all human efforts at extended usefulness, but too frequently sources whence spring sin, and crime, and poverty. Our object in this paper is not to laud the past, is not to prove that our

era,

the heir of all the ages in the foremost files of time," is blacker and more shameful than the truth and fact

:

or, of the means adopted to ensure certainty and safety in the cure, they were buried privately and by night. The operation was performed successfully upon the king; but Felix was so much agitated, that a nervous tremor settled upon him for life, and in bleeding a friend on the day succeeding that upon which the king had been so happily cured, he disabled the patient irreparably. When Felip de Utre went in search of the Omeguas from Venezuela, he was wounded by a spear, thrust through the ribs just beneath the right arm. A Spaniard, who was ignorant of surgery, undertook to cure him, and de Utre's coat of mail was placed upon an old Indian who was mounted on a horse; the amateur surgeon then drove a spear into the Indian's body, through the hole in the armour, and his body having been opened, the spear being still kept in the wound, it was discovered that the heart was uninjured-thus they assumed that de Utre's wound was not mortal, and being treated as if the wound were an ordinary one, he recovered. When Henry II. of France was mortally wounded by a splinter from a spear, in tilting with Montgomerie, which entered his visor and pierced his eye, the surgeons, for the purpose of discovering the probable injury done to the King, cut off the heads of four criminals, and thrust splinters into their eyes, as nearly at the same inclination as the fatal one had entered that of the King. Am. brose Paré's chapter on poisons and his "Strange Cure for a Cut off Nose" which we give in the words of his translator Johnson, is remarkable :"There was a Surgeon of Italy, of late years, which would restore or repair the portion of the Nose that was cut away, after this manner. He first scarified the callous edges of the maimed Nose round about, as is usually done in the cure of Hair-lips; he then made a gash or cavity in the muscle of the arm, which is called biceps, as large as the greatness of the portion of the Nose, which was cut away, did require; and into that gash or cavity so made, he would put that part of the Nose so wounded, and bind the patient's head to his arm, as if it were to a post, so fast that it might remain firm, stable and immovable, and not lean or bow any way; and about forty days after, or at that time when he judged the flesh of the Nose was perfectly agglutinated with the flesh of the arm, he cut out as much of the flesh of the arm, cleaving fast unto the Nose, as was sufficient to supply the defect of that which was lost, and then he would make it even, and bring it, as by licking, to the fashion and form of a Nose, as near as art would permit; and in the meanwhile he did feed his patient with panadoes, gellies, and all such things as were easy to be swallowed and digested. The flesh that is taken out of the arm is not of the like temperature as the flesh of the Nose is; also the holes of the restored Nose cannot be made as they were before.' This translation was published by Mary Clark. London: 1678-and is at page 526 of the book, which is dedicated by Johnson to Lord Herbert of Cherbury.

require. We know that in a free nation, where every man possesses the right, without fear of hindrance or of check, to act openly as may suit his mind, provided he infringe no positive law, and where competition and the struggle for advancement are the moving springs of men's actions, and make the glory of the kingdom, abuses must exist, and errors must be expected. Were this a nation ruled by the will of a despot, and regulated in the details of mercantile affairs, and watched in every turn of daily life by the officials of a bureau, or the spies of a police commissioner, the evils of which we complain might not be less grievous, though less patent in glaring enormity. Naples, with its iron rule; Paris, with its never slumbering, ever suspicious police; Rome, with its foreign hirelings, and its political inquisition; Milan and Vienna, with their miserable petty pryings into every subject's affairs, are stained by crimes peculiar to their people, and as these cities and their countries are corrupt, notwithstanding all the care and watching bestowed upon them, it can excite but little wonder in the mind to find the United Kingdoms marked, in their moral and social condition, by wide-spread and pitiable errors and vices. The time has arrived when the government of these countries must adopt those admirable rules of other nations, by which the health, the morality, and the education of the people can be secured. The preacher has implored, the economist has explained, the patriot has urged, the physician has warned, and in the flight from the old land of those who will work, in the heathenish crime of too many who remain, a grave and momentous lesson is inculcated which must be learned by the statesman who remembers his allegiance to his country, and who knows that in the neglect of these provisions for the amelioration of their social and moral condition lies the foulest treason to the people. We have cured the diseases of their bodies, but the mind we leave to fester in its corruption. We punish those who are criminal, but we never tried to shield them from the blasting contamination of vice. The churchman thunders forth God's curse against sin, and we suffer the grasping house owner to cram his wretched rooms with human beings, age and sex unnoticed. We cry out against this error, and yet permit the building of habitations which can but perpetuate the abuse. We build Lock hospitals, and yet the fallen woman flaunts in our streets," making night hideous," uncared and unwatched,

bearing the seeds of disease, more terrible than that of Job. Our cities are crowded with brothels over which the executive holds no guard. Our manufactories are the seminaries of sin. The cottages of our laborers are but the schools of vice. Our coal-mines are only the working places of biped brutes. Drunkenness is the common luxury of our poor. Murder, incest, infanticide, and a nameless crime, are common entries upon our assize calendars-the Town Missioners of Glasgow write, that upon their mission they find proofs of crimes similar to those recounted in the black pages of Suetonius, outmatching in baseness the foul fancies of the Neapolitan Secret Gallery. And all this arises not because our people are more vicious than other nations, but because our government, in its love for God-like Freedom, takes no care that the corruption of our human nature may not degenerate into devilish licence, and is ignorant or heedless of the home life and condition of our poor.

or

Let us first examine the state of the poorer classes in a great city. The Rookeries of London, like the Liberty of Dublin, are the herding places of the toilers and rogues-they are the abodes of the costermonger, the Irish laborer, the street seller, the servant out of place, the poor artizan, the sweep, the prostitute, and the thief. Here the poor live on from generation to generation. The changing tide of population brings new faces among them, but poverty vice are still the characteristics of all. The boy is taught to thieve; the girl, at the age of twelve years, is sent upon the streets; blows and starvation are their lot if they return without a sum of money sufficient to contribute to support the parent in debauchery, and in drunkenness. To the homes in the Rookeries come at night those who have begged, or stolen, or honestly worked all day. Here the robber, and the decent, but poor man are lodged; the married and the unmarried; the shrinking innocent girl; and the bold, laughing, fallen sister woman; childhood and age all placed side by side; decency neglected in every point; the sense of common delicacy blunted; the name of God never heard save in blasphemy; the air so foul that one scarce knows how human beings can inhale it and live: these are the homes of the vicious, the homes of the virtuous poor-the homes which still exist because the government will not interfere with the RIGHTS of property. The rights of property require that one hundred