law are, that it is popular and mutable; takes its doctrines from the people, and suits them to their views. While the American judiciary enforces this system of jurisprudence, may it never let wars, or popular passions, or foreign influences, impair its principles.

There are about ten thousand physicians in the United States, and medical colleges for their education in Massachusetts, Rhode-Island, Connecticut, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Ohio. There are also two medical universities in the state of New York, one in Pennsylvania, one in Maryland, one in Massachusetts, and one in Kentucky; containing altogether about twelve hundred students. Under the impulses of a new climate and its peculiar distempers, the medical profession has been pursued and its sciences developed with great zeal and success in this country; whose necessities have called forth a bolder and more energetic treatment of diseases, more discriminating and philosophical, as well as decisive and efficient; a more scientific assignment of their causes, and ascertainments of their nature. Many medical errors and prejudices, now abandoned in Europe, were first refuted here. What is justly termed a national character, has been given to the medical science of America, and American medical literature is circulated and read in Europe, where several American medical discoveries and improvements have been claimed as European. Anatomy, the most stationary of the medical sciences, is ardently cultivated, and has been advanced by discoveries in the

American schools.

Valuable contributions have been made to physiology, and more rational views inculcated of animal economy. An American discovery in chemistry has distinguished its author throughout Europe: Where the achievements of this master spirit of sciences, while, to be sure they leave ours behind, yet encourage it to an application full of promise. It is a merit of the American schools, at least, to have accurately defined the bounds of chemistry and physiology. Our diversified soils and climates, afford inexhaustible healing and balsamic plants, many of which have been adopted into the materia medica, and displayed in publications creditable to the literature and some of the fine arts, as well as the science of this country. And the bowels of this continent are rich with sanative minerals, some of which, likewise, have been extracted and made known both to science and by literature. Mr. Cleaveland's treatise on mineralogy is, I believe, used as a text book in Great Britain.

American physicians are probably unrivalled in the knowledge and use of what are termed the heroic remedies. They have introduced new and rational doctrines respecting the operation of remedies; combatting the notion of their reception into the circulation, and referring it to the principle of sympathy. They deny the asserted identity of remedies; believing, that they have succeeded in proving an essential difference in their operation, not only in degree, but in effect. The American improvements in Surgery are too numerous, and

though not the less important, too minute and technical, to be generalised in a summary. Its apparatus, mechanism, and operations, have been improved by a theory and practice equal in science, skill and success, to any in the world. But its greatest melioration is philosophical. The founder of most of the improvements in surgery alluded to, deeming its most skilful operations, but imperfections in the preserving art, reserves them for its last resort, never to be performed till all means of natural cure prove abortive. On this exalted principle the great Hunter taught and practised; uniting humanity and philosophy to science and art; a benefactor, whose original and admirable suggestions it is the merit of American physicians and surgeons to have introduced into their practice in this country, before their imputed innovations were reconciled to pre-conceived opinions in his own.

Midwifery, both practical and theoretical, has also received essential improvements in the American school, some of which have been declared by high authority to mark an æra in the obstetric practice. In the theory and practice of medicine, the improvements are too many and important for my recital. The gastric pathology, the prevailing treatment and theory of hydrokephalus, and of dropsies in general, the boasted European practice in marasmus, the cure of the croup, of gout by evacuations, the arrest of malignant erisipelas, and of mortification, and of inflamation of the veins; in short, a long list of remedial systems, which might be enumerated, though claimed in Europe, belong

to America. The vaunted suggestion of Europe, that fever originates in sympathetic irritation, and that venesection and other evacuations are requisite in the primary stages of it, have long been the established doctrines of America, where they were first demonstrated. American medical science and skill have outstripped those of the rest of the world, Europe included, in the character and treatment of epidemics and pestilences. In this great field, Europe has done little, while the progress of America has been great. Bigoted to antiquated notions the medical science of the old world has stagnated for centuries in prejudices, which have been expelled in the new, where the causes, nature, laws, and treatment of these destructive visitations have been ascertained and systematised. English critics particularly dwell with exultation on their supposed late triumphs over these distempers. Divested of the long prevalent notion of debility and putrescency, they now urge depletion as if the suggestion were their own, whereas thirty years have elapsed since the physicians of this country were in the full employment of it.

The theory and practice of medicine, the fearless and generous resistance of pestilential disease, suggest a recollection of a late medical professor here, whose works are in the libraries of the learned in many countries, and in several languages, whose fascinating manners and eloquent lectures largely contributed to the foundation of a flourishing school, whose zeal, if some times excessive, was characteristic of genius, and the pioneer of success; whose services,

let me add, as a patriot, and a philantropist, shed a divine lustre on his career as a physician. The first leading man to lay down his life in battle in the American revolution, was an eminent physician. The best historian of that period, was also an eminent physician: And in a country, which knows no grade above that of the eminent in learning and usefulness, there have been, and there are, many others of this profession to whom more than professional celebrity belongs. They frequently unite political with professional distinctions. Many of the members of this profession, have filled various stations in every branch of our government. Many of them at this moment, occupy high executive and legislative public offices. The pernicious and degrading system which subdivides labour infinitesimally a system useful perhaps for pin-makers, but most injurious in all the thinking occupationshas no countenance in America. The American physician practices pharmacy, surgery, midwifery; and is cast on his own resources for success in all he does: The consequence of which is, that he is forced to think more for himself, and of course to excel. In Europe, successful physicians are too often made so by favour or chance. They are, moreover, the luxuries of the metropolis and a few great cities. Throughout the interior of England, generally, the medical attendant is an uneducated apothecary, whose science stops at the compounding of a drug, or the opening of a vein. Even in London, this class is always in reserve to succeed the preliminary and expensive visits of the doctor;

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