their school." It is firmness, joined with good-humour, that is so essential a requisite for a teacher. He who is perpetually with a fierce countenance, angry tone, and harsh words, will soon fall into contempt, and he will, at last, cease even to be a scare-crow. Masters of this unfortunate disposition always seem to forget that, by roughly speaking to the pupil, they set an example of the same to the objects of their pernicious passion. "Passionate chiding," says Locke," usually carries rough and ill language with it, which has this further ill effect, that it teaches and justifies it in children. And the names that parents and preceptors give them, they will not be ashamed to bestow on others, having so good an authority for the use of them." As long as teachers adopt this system, they will excite the contempt of their pupils, who will make little or no progress, except in the development of their animal organs.

It is often said that peculiar and careful methods of teaching may be necessary with infants, but when a pupil has "arrived at a certain age," he should work independent of the teacher, from whom he would only require occasional hints. This might be the case if a right method of instruction was adopted when young. But, as Locke truly remarks, "having made them ill children, we foolishly expect them to be good men." And this expectation, like every other founded on wrong grounds, always has been, and always will be, disappointed.

I have only been able to touch on a few of the more prominent topics relating to education in this paper, owing to my limited space; but as it is a subject which involves the well-being and happiness of all classes, I trust these remarks will induce an investigation into the defective system which at present exists in this country. S. D. W.

ON THE IMPORTANCE OF THE STUDY OF BOTANY TO MEDICINE.

BY C. JOHNSON, Lecturer on Botany at Guy's Hospital."

REVERTING to the state of the medical profession some twenty or thirty years back, and the ignorance of too many of its self-elected practitioners, of the most essential requisites for a pretender to the healing art, a knowledge of the anatomy and physiology of the human frame, and the symptoms and treatment of the various diseases by which its functions are liable to be interrupted and impaired-the denizen of the present time has much reason to congratulate himself upon the revolution which it has undergone since that period-a revolution that has contributed towards rendering even the uncertain tenure of mortality less precarious, by securing to him the advice and assistance of persons expressly qualified, by their education, for that purpose. The impudent system of quackery, so often held up to ridicule at the present day, was certainly not without its parallel formerly in the so-called medical profession, when, after a longer or shorter period spent in pounding and compounding, the capability of administering both simples and compounds seemed naturally to follow. The lengthened and important course of studies required at the present day, does not wholly preclude the possibility of a man of inferior talent entering the profession, but we have still the satisfaction of knowing that a complete blockhead has not the same opportunity that he once had, of placing himself in competition with the man of ability and liberal education.

Of the various branches of knowledge that bear upon medical science, Botany seems to have been the most backward in arresting the attention of those entrusted with the superintendence of medical education. The improvement of this latter has been progressive; and the impression of the high importance of those studies that led to a knowledge of the structure and functions of the animal body,

*The following paper was read before the Medico-Botanical Society, London, on the first meeting of the present session, Nov. 10th, 1835.

of the practice of medicine, of chemistry, and materia medica, caused them, under the then existing circumstances, to precede that of botany. Hence, indeed, long after the establishment of schools for the tuition and preparation of candidates for medical license, it continued to be regarded as a mere adjunct of the latter class, materia medica. As such it was confined, in this country at least, to the notice of the plants of the pharmacopoeia; and as regarded his progress in a science now so complex, the student of medicine, thus tutored, resembled the preacher who could read, but only in his own book. He might have learned to know the drowsy poppy of the garden, perhaps even to trace its relation with the gaudier crimson tenants of the corn-field-challenge the drastic hellebore, the foxglove, nightshade, and conium, of his native land; but was rarely capable of extending his lore to the more distant affinities which characterize the vegetation of a different clime; and therefore illcalculated to avail himself of their valuable, or to avoid their baneful, properties: still less to add, by observation and experiment, to the most useful department of that science, to a knowledge of which he would, probably, pretend.

Among the several causes which have led to a more extended application of botany to the purposes of medicine, the establishment of the Medico-Botanical Society may certainly lay considerable claim to public notice. During its career, the attention of a large portion of the junior members and aspirants of the profession, has been directed by it to the importance of a subject which, but for their attendance upon its meetings, would, probably, have remained a matter of indifference to them. I say of indifference-because the extensive facilities afforded to the mere mechanical practitioner, and of such there are, unfortunately, still too many, by the vast commercial machinery of this ever active and enterprising nation, has rendered him, in a great measure, independent of his own resources. gives an order to his druggist, depending upon the latter for the correctness of its execution; and as to anything farther, why-as an unworthy disciple of Esculapius not long since replied to a friend of mine, who ventured to hint that too violent medicine had been administered to an infant-" There is a book called the pharmacopœia, in which the art of compounding medicines for every disorder,

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and even the proportionate doses for every age, are duly set down. I always consult that book before I prescribe, and therefore, Madam, cannot be under a mistake." So that, really, with a good druggist, named bottles and jars, and Thompson's Dispensatory upon his counter, such a man may do a good stroke of business, as the mercantile phrase has it, with very little judgment, but a great deal of satisfaction-to himself. For the sake of their patients, I fear very few such attend here; for they would learn, at least, that drugs will vary very greatly in quality—that the bark, the root, the herb of the same species, gathered at different seasons, do not contain the same principles; this, at one period, is an active medicine, at another, next to useless; and besides, if chicanery will practice upon the immediate necessaries of life, the commerce of medicine is not likely to be wholly free from its impositions.

Experience has shewn that not only the imported articles of the materia medica, but even those of home growth, are often the vehicles of fraud that renders negative, if it does not totally subvert the intentions of the adviser. The leaves of the senna are mingled with those of several other plants, of less valuable and of deleterious quality; the lithontriptic and diuretic properties of the uva-ursi, are supplanted by the simple astringency of the vaccin. vit. id. : and even the bark of the tree of life itself—the highly-prized cinchona -is vilified, and its restorative virtues abused, by the cupidity of the fraudulent and grasping trader, who, with no other object in view than that of his individual profit, scruples not to impose upon his ignorant customers that of other trees of inferior worth. Now, even in the state in which these and numerous other vegetable substances are submitted to the inspection of the faculty, a knowledge of botany will often afford a test of no small importance in the choice of an article which a person proposes to prescribe and administer, where his fortune, and, what is more valuable to a medical man, his reputation, is at stake. Even a very few years since, how few in this country were possessed of a sufficient share of that knowledge for such an application of it. Men who had risen to the highest rank in their profession, scarce knew a nettle from a crowfoot, and the capability of not confounding a mullein with a foxglove, seemed almost a miraculous stretch of botanical ‹cquirement

for a doctor, to one who had heard, in a very learned assembly too, a yellow gentian, in full flower, hailed as a splendid specimen of digitalis. Such ignorance, however, was pardonable in the accomplished individual who betrayed it-in one educated at a period in which the utility of botany was not even dreamed of, as a necessary part of the study for a physician. Now, however, who would be justified in pleading apology for overlooking or slighting the advantages it offers? Surely no one is ignorant that the structure of the vegetable frame is determined by laws as absolute, as invariable in their action, when left to the guidance of nature, as are those which govern the development of the various species of animal existence; and that as the mighty genius of comparative anatomy, the highly talented and lamented Cuvier, could, by his magic touch, bid the disunited and scattered bones of a thousand different individuals arrange in the original order of the frames they once gave form to and supported; so the botanist, practised in the intricate lore of vegetable anatomy and physiology, reads often, in the venation of a leaf, or the texture of a bark, the character of the plant to which it belonged, in opposition to that of others whose products may be mingled with them. Thus, without any knowledge of the individual plant which produced them, he would scarcely suspect the dotted leaves of this plant, to possess the same qualities with the finely reticulated ones of that beside it-because the very presence of such dots upon leaves, which are glands for the secretion of some essential oil, he knows to be, in almost every instance, an important and invariable feature of the order or natural group in which it is found and, therefore, that their absence betokens very different affinities and properties. In the same way, he would not mistake the silkytextured bark of the thymeler, the daphne or mezereum tribe, for that of the laurines, the bay or cinnamon tribe; the different structure of the two would be to him as certainly indicative of their being the produce of two widely distant orders, as is the caustic character of the former, contrasted with the fine aromatic and stomachic qualities of the latter.

It is true such important distinctions as these may not exist between the much libelled Peruvian drug, and its spurious substitutes or representatives, but another branch of botanical knowledge would