Nature, in now hoarding up and now spreading abroad buried germs of useful plants for man's benefit, is illustrated by a fact mentioned to me by my friend Sir Joseph Fayrer, and lately cited in My Notes on the Diseases of India, that, after the incessant cannonade of the enemy had crumbled to dust much of the frail defenses which surrounded the Residency at Lucknow, the wild spinach of India (sag), a useful antiscorbutic, sprang up from the débris of pulverized brickwork, and was brought in by our soldiers, under fire, and sold, weight for weight against rupees, to the officers, who bought it for their wives and children perishing from scurvy. We were told, a few years ago, that red roses still flourish wildly where so much Lancastrian blood was poured out four hundred years ago, on the field of Towton. The Scottish thistle, doubtless planted by the attendants of Mary Stuart, still flourishes on the site of Fotheringhay, although not one stone of that great ducal fortalice remains upon another; and it is a well-known fact, in the North, that the line of the Roman wall is peculiarly rich in those medicinal plants which were used by the Roman physicians.

The geologist, the botanist, and the zoologist naturally and readily become antiquaries. Their work requires that they should visit the remotest and least frequented districts; and, while they examine the structure of the rocks or the flora and fauna of each locality, they readily observe and perhaps discover antiquities which time has hidden from eyes less practiced. Thus it is that, in our own time, Nilson, the zoologist, has taken a foremost place among northern archæologists.

The chemist must have a very unlearned knowledge of his science if he cannot give the history of his predecessors, the alchemists, Raimond Lully, Basil Valentine, who discovered the medical uses of antimony, and Paracelsus; and unless he can show how chemistry was developed by Boyle, Cavendish, Lavoisier, Priestly, and Davy.

Many medical men, like Charles Patin, the numismatist, Sir Thomas Brown, Dr. William Stukeley, and Professor Simpson, whose memory is still fresh wherever medicine is valued in its highest scientific aspects, were eminent antiquaries-that faculty which enables a man to discover how to read the inscription on a

coin which time has rendered, to all appearance, perfectly flat, by placing it on a plate of red-hot metal, being nearly akin to that power of cultivated observation by which the mysteries of pathological action are investigated and interpreted. Chief among modern archeologists is to be named a gentleman long a general practitioner in the city, in the center of the remains of Roman London. Encouraging the mud-larks of the river Thames, and the laborers who dug the sewers and laid down the gas mains, he gradually collected from the river shingle, from the bed of the ancient Wall-Brook, by the Mansion House, and from the dust pits of the city of the Proconsuls, so rich a store of Samian ware, such a variety of ornaments, so many works of art, statuary, tesselated pavements, sarcophagi, utensils, and weapons, that Roman London was virtually re-discovered by his researches, and lives again, at the Guildhall, after fifteen centuries of obliteration, in the collections of Charles Roach Smith.

What a solace may archæology become to the perhaps not extremely successful country doctor who has within him a scintilla of real antiquarian feeling! His daily round, perhaps through mile after mile of the bleakest, barest, ugliest country in the realm, becomes to him a course of never failing interest. We will say that it is nearly all down or moorland, without a grove or a single stately tree to afford it shade or to relieve its blankness, or one babbling stream or pleasant waterfall to give it life and freshness. And yet how full of interest it is to him! Yonder hideous church tower is nearly unique as an unrestored specimen of well authenticated Saxon architecture. In the churchyard is a rude stone cross, the inscription on which he has been enabled to read by aid of the Runic alphabet in his Penny Cyclopædia. The stump on this knoll by the wayside shows where Hardriding Rob, the highwayman, was gibbeted in chains. That shapeless mass of coarse stone rubble, traversed with bright red sections of baked tiles, is one of the vestigia of a Roman city which lies buried here, and from the confines of which the country folk often bring him relics, of which he alone, in that neighborhood, knows the true import and historic value, ranging from the invasion of Claudius and throughout the four hundred years of Roman occupation until the last trireme left our shores. From

this old chalk-pit the diggers (he is not to be imposed upon by the Stone Jacks who manufacture these relics) procure him and sell him for copper these palæolithic and neolithic flint spear heads, arrow heads, and hatchets, his collection of which is beginning to obtain celebrity. Across that valley is a British earthwork, and upon it the still distinctly bared cutting of a gigantic human figure, most clearly defined when rain has fallen and the tender grass springs up along its outline. In this, enclosed within strong hurdles, the Druids used to sacrifice human captives by the hecatomb. Out there are Celtic barrows in all their varieties of form, the long and the conical, the twin barrow and the Druid barrow, the burial places of prehistoric chieftains. Just here was fought one of the grimmest battles of the Wars of the Roses. See how bravely the corn waves where the dead lie thickest, and where, as lately happened in the "Bloody Meadow" battle-field at Tewkesbury, the teeth of the flower of England are brought to light wherever the plowshare passes. On the green sward, a little farther on, once a Roman cursus, one of Rupert's fiery charges broke a squadron of ironsides as a gust of east wind scatters the thistle-down.

The museum of the nearest city, so much indebted as it is to his knowledge and contributions, is, to him, a place of delightful resort. The sight of a new number of Notes and Queries, containing his reply to a long debated question, upon his study table when he returns at night, almost worn out by toil, to which disappointment has perhaps added tenfold weariness, seems to renew the life within him; and the occasional festival of the Archælogical Society, of which he is an active member and the chief local cicerone and expositor, affords him unalloyed delight.

Some matter-of-fact hearers may say "All this is very well, by way of amusement, to the few who care for such old-world matters; but you have described to us a mere unpractical Dry-asDust who wastes his time and his money in desultory ramblings and earth grubbings which bring him and his patients no valid and substantially useful return. It is not so. His leisure is pleasantly and, at the very least, harmlessly occupied; utter weariness of the toils and troubles of life is not permitted to eat his soul up; and, for the rest, the people respect him for his great

earnestness, his strange knowledge, and his pure life; and his intercourse with the clergy and squirearchy of his district is rendered safe and pleasant by their recognition of the fact that their medical attendant, whose professional knowledge they have no power of gauging, is undoubtedly a gentleman of refined and scholarly tastes. Let me repeat-Your patients have, for the most part, very little notion as to whether you are or are not competent physicians and surgeons. In this respect any impudent quack will often strike and attract the laity more than you will ever succeed in doing. But you will fail in your duty to yourselves and your profession if you do not take honest, unostentatious means to acquaint the society into which you are thrown that you are well educated men of cultivated intelligence.

Here I must offer a caution which, with some, will condemn my main argument. However praiseworthy and useful the occupations of the physician's leisure may be in themselves, he must pursue them with some caution, I will not say secresy, at least until his professional reputation is fully established. The enemy readily discover a weak point; any gibe that stings a rival will serve in turn. It was said of a student who went in for the prize in medicine, "We must either give the medal to him or give him nothing." "Well, he shall have the latter, he is a bookish man." I knew a surgeon who fell very little short of greatness, who failed in life because he had become branded with the name of "pathologist." It must not be charged against us that we sacrifice our duty to our amusements or even to our special studies. "Dr. said a patient, "is probably too much engaged in his literary pursuits to afford proper attention to the sick." John Bell's remark upon his brother and superior, Sir Charles, is alleged to have been, "The body draws." I was present when it was proposed, but not seconded, in our municipality at that the city surveyor, an exemplary officer, but an admirable amateur photographer, should be ordered to give over taking sunpictures. But this difficulty attends nearly all visible and active amusements, and he is unfit for our profession who is not both discreet and moderate.

To myself, a strong, but, I trust, not ill-regulated, love for antiquarian reading has (to say little of the rest and gratification

which it has given in an active career in which ordinary" amusement" has obtained no part at all) afforded me great and valid assistance as a professor of medicine, as a hospital physician, and as an investigator and writer in the subjects of pathology, public hygiene, and medical jurisprudence, for research in which India affords an admirable field. In all my subjects of study, old books yielded me endless lessons. Let us take one of these. Throughout that web which forms the etiology of most of the prevailing diseases, not only of India, but also of England, run two threads of pathological influence, by the accurate tracing of which the physician can often alone hope to unravel the mesh in which his patients are enveloped. These two factors are the marsh poison and scorbutus. What modern physician, of English training, can efficiently cope with these most insidious and tenacious constitutional taints unless he has paid close attention to history? He can have seen very little pure and unmasked malarious fever in the city hospital where he studied; but, at this moment, there are plenty of marshes and bad food in the United Kingdom; and history tells him that, in ancient times, marsh disease swept down the haughtiest heads of England's royalty and nobility. Henry of Agincourt, Wolsey, Walter Devereux, Lord Deputy of Ireland, and a host of other distinguished persons, died of dysentery or some cognate disease. Mary of England, Cardinal Pole, James the First, Cromwell, and Charles the Second died of marsh fever. In fact, it is a truth, albeit a quaint one, that the Reformation was, validly, the first great step in the march of sanitary reform in England. It led to the filling up of the moats and stews, fish ponds and lakes, which furnished diet for fast-days, and which maintained a constant supply of paludal poison at the very door of every country house in England, as the tank or water pit now does beside each hovel in Bengal. Again, who, although he may have worked for years in a seaman's hospital, either in this country or in India, can know much of fully developed scurvy unless he has pondered over the miserable but invaluable lesson afforded by the narrative of Anson's voyage, and has made himself thoroughly acquainted with sea scurvey as its every phase is delineated in the now antiquated pages of Lind and Trotter? Land scurvy is present nearly everywhere among the poor, and often