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N the house of letters there are many delightful mansions; but, according to my own taste and judgment, the first competent, comprehensive biography of a great contemporary is the most important and the most stimulating form of current literature. It presents what our society needs above everything else: an objective made visible, an ideal made contagious by realization. If wishing could do it, I would wish "The Life of Sir William Osler" into the hands of every man, woman and child who reads the six best-selling novels.

When one comes to think of it, there are excellent reasons for bringing the layman in at this point. The lay public often fears the lawyers, sometimes shuns the clergy, but, through thick and thin, it clings to the physicians. Year after year we laymen furnish them "laboratory material." We are intensely interested in the outcome of their experiments. In the long run from the cradle to the grave we are certain to have been many times in debt, and indebted, to them.

Furthermore, Dr. Osler, though a most resolute and devoted physician, was much else that interests the laity. In his earlier years he was a passionate student of the fundamental sciences, and as an Oxford professor he was a propagandist for scientific studies