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medieval monk who sought charitably to alleviate the maladies of which he was innocently ignorant. There is the gossiping barber-surgeon who operated indifferently with razor and lancet, and who had his regular civic clientèle who came to him for bleeding, as a precautionary measure, or when troubled by some ailment. Then the light of science begins to break out of the darkness, and there are practitioners, accredited or otherwise, with faint glimmerings of scientific knowledge. There was the minister who denounced witchcraft in all its forms, who banned the "wise woman" with her spells, and even looked askance at the rural midwife; and who beneficently practised with the "simples" which were grown in the garden of the manse. At least he was not as venturesome as the blacksmith practitioner Scott met in Northumbria, who dosed his patients with "laudamy and calamy"; and confessing that fatal mischances would occur, pled that "onyhow it would be lang ere they made up for Flodden." There was the laird's good wife, the Lady Bountiful of the parish, who laid in rhubarb and senna with the season's groceries, and furnished these drastic remedies indiscriminately to obsequious tenants. Probably that uneducated medical help was better than nothing, and for long it was a case of Hobson's choice. Then Mrs Rodger exhibits various specimens of the country doctor, who spent his toilsome days among dangers in the saddle, and never reckoned on an untroubled night. If he did not sleep in his riding-boots, they always stood ready to be drawn on. As to his fees, the less said of them the better; even comparatively wealthy landowners paid him in kind or in dinners. He lived by the farming which was a second drain on his energies, as even the town physicians would fall back on the chemist's shop, or possibly a farm. Neither the one nor the other had "a position" to keep up. The country doctor would have advertised himself a fool had he forded flooded streams and forced fathomless snowdrifts in a suit of sables, and the town doctor did more than the conventionalities demanded, if he dressed in decent broadcloth and sported buckles in his shoes. More dignified were the solemn professors of the universities, who, if like the parrot of story they were sometimes constitutionally taciturn, were in all probability "beggars to think." Johnson, on his visit to Aberdeen, expressed some contempt for their conversational cowardice, but that was only a proof of Aberdonian shrewdness. They knew that their illustrious visitor was cunning of fence, and had been keeping his hand in by constant practice among the Burkes and the Beau-clerks of the English metropolis. Not a few of these discreet old gentlemen were really savants, and some were professors of medicine with a genius for chemical and anatomical research, though sadly hampered by the difficulty in procuring subjects. So we come to the ambitious young medical students, at whose illegal proceedings their seniors connived, and who risked the prison and penal servitude in the interests of science by violating the sanctity of graveyards. Then we have the surgeons and doctors who sought their fortunes abroad, or served with the British troops on the Continent and India; and, lastly, there are the physicians of yesterday or to-day, who drive in their carriages, leave competencies to their heirs, and die in the odour of celebrity, affiliated to learned societies.

Indebted for all our inspiration to Mrs Rodger, wo shall venture