the University is required. After complying with these regulations, besides giving theses on the various subjects previously studied, candidates must likewise publish an inaugural dissertation. As already stated, the curriculum required at the Portuguese medico-chirurgical schools is nearly identical with that of Coimbra; but in addition to publishing an inaugural dissertation, all aspirants for surgical diplomas must likewise propound six theses, three being on medical and three on surgical questions, wherewith the period of pupilage terminates.

Attached to the institutions named, there are students in pharmacy, and also female pupils who propose becoming midwives. The term of attendance for either class is two years, the preliminary qualification for candidates in the first category being knowledge of mathematics, philosophy, Latin, and their own language. If they are afterwards found duly qualified, a licence to act as pharmaceutists or midwives is then granted to such candidates respectively.

Analogous to several European countries, which need not be here specified, medical reform has of late years much occupied the profession throughout Portugal, especially with reference to the recently-established medico-chirurgical schools in the metropolis. Among other questions which were lately discussed in the Portuguese Parliament, one was that of augmenting the number of medical professors at these establishments. Most of the mooted propositions were, however, so strongly opposed by conservative Coimbra University authorities, who have two members in the Chamber of Deputies, that various attempts made during several years proved unsuccessful. Still, lectures on legal medicine were instituted in a late session, and reformers confidently anticipate that further improvements will be enacted by the Legislature and carried out by Government.

(To be concluded.)

REVIEW IX.

1. The Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man; with Remarks on Theories of the Origin of Species by Variation. By SIR CHARLES LYELL, F.R.S. Second Edition, revised. Illustrated by Woodcuts.-London, 1863. pp. 528.

2. The Antiquity of Man. (Edinburgh Review,' July, 1863.) 3. Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature. By THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY, F.R.S.-London, 1863. pp. 159.

WHATEVER drawbacks there may be to some persons in the practice of the "healing art," there can exist but very few, we should imagine, to the study of medicine as a general science. The only stumblingblocks that we can think of are its necessitating a greater or less familiarity with the dead, and with decomposing bodies, with foci of

infection, and with the excreta of the human machine. With some, no circumstance nor time can overcome the repulsiveness of these necessities. But most studies and professions have their unpleasant conditions, occasionally even duties of no little danger. And which of them can lay claim to the manifold attractions with which medicine, after all, allures the votaries in her train? Does not every study appear by the side of it imperfect, unsatisfying? The study of medicine alone gives a key to the mysteries surrounding us, and imparts to all a life we could not otherwise perceive. Of course, we use the term "medicine" in its wider sense-not in the simple application of its principles and experience, as the "ars medendi," but as that wide and all-embracing study which, beginning with physics, chemistry, and natural history, passes on to human and comparative 'biology, and appears finally adorned with such jewels of knowledge as the graver lore taught at the bedside of disease and death can alone impart. Herein lies the power of medicine over her disciples-viz., in her dealing with so many, as well as with the more recondite of nature's secrets. A man may be the profoundest lawyer, or the deepest philologist, the divinest artist, the most learned theologian; he may be the great warrior, navigator, engineer, and yet as either such simply he may walk abroad through creation and be deaf to more than half she utters. But let him have studied medicine as medicine may be studied, and he at once becomes free to the arcana arcanissima at his feet. He possesses more surely and extensively than any other man such a range and peculiarity of information as can vivify the world in a way to be vivified by no other one. So far as the pure botanist, pure chemist, pure anatomist, &c., are concerned, he cannot, of course, read such deep lessons in individual books of nature as can they. But he has this power, he can read something, often a great deal, in all of them, as well as in that, the most wondrous of all, and the most hidden to others-viz., the sybilline leaves of the body and mind in disease. Thus the man who comprehensively studies medicine becomes master of such a passe partout, that no other study can bestow. We have sometimes tried to think how we should have translated, or what kind of notion we should have formed of the strange acts and processes going on around us, had we not sat at the feet of the old man of Cos. Of the existence of a great number we should not have been conscious, it is true; but of those of whose presence we were aware, what should we have indeed thought? But we cannot now compass the idea of such an ignorance, having, thanks be to God, the key of knowledge in our hands.

All embracing as our department of knowledge is-various as are the formative sciences upon which it is based-there is undoubtedly a great difference as regards the nature and amount of help which the latter afford us in arriving at our culminating or practical effort—the alleviation of sickness and of disease. Some of these collateral branches can offer us but little, others are vital in the extreme. The former must be resigned in the propylaeum; the latter accompany us into the adytum of the Esculapian fane. But having left the latter, 65-XXXIII.

our novitiate passed, and having stepped out into the world with a little time to look about us ere we take our settled place, how many of us are there not who, remembering the charms of some of those fair handmaids of knowledge we left upon the temple steps ere we passed beneath its dome, return to them, single one out, and fly with her, and dwell with her for ever! He who was to have become the physician, the practitioner of the healing art, becomes instead botanist, chemist, or naturalist, &c., as the case may be. To such as remain true to their vows, becoming members of the profession of medicine in its strictest sense, the progress of these collateral branches of knowledge they were once grounded in, generally continues to be matter of considerable interest. The merest practitioner cannot hear of their novelties without some recognition of them; whilst to the more intellectual of the medical circle, a chief delight is to give such attention to them as the urgencies of active practice may permit. Little, in the majority of cases, no doubt, this is, and it would be often less were it not for such literary and scientific jackals like ourselves, whose duty it is to hunt out the lion's provender, and lay it before him, so that as little as possible of the monarch's time be uselessly spent. And this office we are now about to perform, believing that the intellectual banquet we shall provide will be worthy of attention. We cannot say it will be food for babes, but rather meat for strong men; yet, with all, there will be found a piquancy about it. And, so far, it is in accordance with the fashion of the time, for sensation is the order of the day. “Spiritualism” has to struggle for its own; it is pushed almost from its seat by the Aurora Floyds and Lady Audleys of feminine literature. In theology, there are Essays and Reviews,' Colenso's Enquiry,' and 'La Vie de Jesus' by Renan. Chemistry dazzles us with spectrum analysis. Astronomy startles us about the sun. * Engineers present us with a main-drainage scheme; Social Science with "woman's work;" Zoology with the gorilla; the theatres with ghosts; medicine with the renewal of life;

"I have still to advert to Mr. Naysmith's remarkable discovery that the bright surface of the sun is composed of an aggregation of apparently solid forms shaped like willow-leaves or some well-known forms of Diatomacea, and interlacing one another in every direction. The forms are so regular in size and shape as to have led to a suggestion from one of our profoundest philosophers of their being organisins possibly even partaking of the nature of life, but at all events closely connected with the heating and vivifying influences of the sun. These mysterious objects, which since Mr. Naysmith discovered them have been seen by other observers as well, are computed to be each not less than 1000 miles in length and about 100 miles in breadth. The enormous caverns in the sun's photosphere, to which we apply the diminutive term 'spots,' exhibit the extremities of these leaf-like bodies pointing inwards and fringing the sides of the cavern far down into the abyss. Sometimes they form a sort of rope or bridge across the cavern, and appear to adhere to one another by lateral attraction. I can imagine nothing more deserving of the scrutiny of observers than these extraordinary forms."-(The President's Address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science, September, 1863.) This apparent conversion of the sun into a cluster of glowworms or fireflies will no doubt be received with a degree of hesitation, considering that astronomers have at the same time announced that they have likewise just found that they have hitherto been wrong as regards the solar parallax. This they propose to increase so as to bring the earth closer to the sun by four million of miles, and to diminish the distances and dimensions of all the planets! (Hind, Stone, Hanson.)

and last, though not least, comes the geologist, with the Antiquity of Man.'

From the comprehensive character of the study of medicine, we become privileged to say that certain of the branches of knowledge by which the latter question is unravelled and tested fairly belong to the list of the collaterals of our own department. Since this question is a highly-interesting one, we intend availing ourselves of this privilege, and of devoting a few pages to a succinct account of it. The argument now sub judice may be expressed thus in a few words.

Does the first appearance of man upon the earth date back from incalculable ages, or not longer than a few (six) thousand years? But little more than half a century back, it was the general belief that the globe itself was not older than six thousand years, and that it, along with all living things upon its surface, was formed and fashioned in that period of time which we now reckon as a week. To doubt this was held at any rate to be equivalent to a disbelief in the fundamental doctrines of revealed religion. But men increased in knowledge, and it was found that such a literal chronology of the Mosaic writings as they had hitherto been endowed with was not God's gift, but man's, and that the space of time, both when the earth was originated and during which it was in process of formation, could be carried back and magnified to uncountable ages, without any disrespect to the intentionally vague information which the Infinite had vouchsafed concerning them. To satisfy, however, the "weaker brethren," it became necessary to distinctly indicate a method by which such a reconciliation could take place; and consequently several theories were propounded to bring about the harmony of geology and Genesis. These it is not our purpose, of course, to discuss; but it is not irrelevant to our present position to state that, whilst we hold it impossible that we shall ever be able to establish such a parallelism between the great characteristics of the Mosaic days and the paleontologic remains of geologic epochs as shall satisfy acuter intellects, yet that for all the purposes of the Christian apologist, we agree with those who think the hypothesis usually associated with the name of Chalmers, and afterwards illustrated in the earlier writings of Hugh Miller, amply sufficient.

Dr. Chalmers, so early as 1804, had arrived at the conviction that "The writings of Moses do not fix the antiquity of the globe. If they fix anything, it is only the antiquity of the species. In the article on Christianity, this general assertion appears in a more distinct and intelligible form. When it is asked, 'Does Moses ever say that there was not an interval of many ages betwixt the first act of creation described in the first verse of the book of Genesis, and said to have been performed at the beginning, and those more detailed operations the account of which commences at the second verse? . . . Or does he ever make us to understand that the genealogies of man went any farther than to fix the antiquity of the species, and of consequence that they left the antiquity of the globe a free subject for the speculations of philosophers? . . . . It is not said when the beginning was. We know the general

See an article entitled "Genesis and Science," in North British Review for November, 1857.

impression to be that it was on the earlier part of the first day, and that the first act of creation formed part of the same day's work with the formation of light. We ask our readers to turn to that chapter, and to read the first five verses of it. Is there any forcing in the supposition that the first verse describes the primary act of creation, and leaves it at liberty to place it as far back as we may? that the first half of the second verse describes the state of the earth (which may already have existed for ages, and been the theatre of geological revolutions) at the point of time anterior to the detailed operations of this chapter, and that the motion of the Spirit of God described in the second clause of the second verse was the commencement of these operations ?"*

In the First Impressions of England and its People,' by Mr. Hugh Miller, the above theory was further illustrated, though it was afterwards abandoned by the writer, in his Testimony of the Rocks.' From the former work we make the following extracts :

"Between the creation of the matter of which the earth is composed, as enunciated in the first verse, and the earth's void and chaotic state as described in the second, a thousand creations might have intervened. As may be demonstrated from even the writings of Moses himself, the continuity of a narrative furnishes no evidence whatever that the facts which it records were continuous. Take, for instance, the following passage: There went out a man of the house of Levi, and took to his wife a daughter of Levi. And the woman conceived and bare a son, and when she saw that he was a goodly child, she hid him three months. And when she could no longer hide him, she took for him an ark of bulrushes, and daubed it with slime and with pitch, and put the child therein, and she laid it in the flags by the river's brink.' The narrative here is quite as continuous as in the first three verses of Genesis. In the order of the relation, the marriage of the parents is as directly followed in the one case by the birth of a son as the creation of matter is followed in the other by the first beginnings of the existing state of things. . . We know, however, from succeeding portions of Scripture, that the father and mother of this child had several other children born to them in the period that intervened between their marriage and his birth. Had it been as necessary for the purpose of revelation that reference should have been made to the intervening creations in the one case as to the intervening births in the other, we doubtless would have heard of them too. . . . . it was not necessary at all. . . . . The ferns and lepidodendra of the coal measures are as little connected with the truths which influence our spiritual state as the vegetable productions of Mercury or of Pallas; the birds and reptiles of the oolite, as the unknown animals that inhabit the plains or disport in the rivers of Saturn or Uranus. And so revelation is as silent on the periods and orders of systems and formations as on the relative positions of the earth and sun, or the places and magnitudes of the planets."+

Though acquiescence has now for some time been accorded to the belief that geology demonstrates the earth was not created only six thousand years ago, and that Revelation does not apodictically affirm it was so, any alteration of opinion with regard to the origin of man has not been generally admitted. He, it has been strenuously maintained, is a recent visitor. A few writers, it is true, have asserted the contrary, affirming that geology proved a more ancient origin of man, and that Revelation did not gainsay it. Even the orthodox and cautious author of the Researches into the Physical History of Mankind,' * Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Thomas Chalmers, D.D., &c., vi. pp. 386,

387.

Op. cit., third edition, pp. 321, 323.