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34 removal, beyond the difficulty of rousing attention, the diffi- culty of bringing into action a distracted power, and directing it towards one focus.

We waste our energies in a fruitless struggle to raise ourselves in individual classes, by a sort of mternecine contention, instead of making one general effort to elevate our pursuit. Every class has its grievances, real or supposed. In one department, fretting under the imdignities imposed on it by law, we find contention for the honours of collegiate government. A second has sought emancipation from the contact of pharmaceutics, in the assumption of a title. The third has claimed superiority in the exclusive right to treat disease, within a certain locality; and on these lesser objects of contention, we fritter away on comparative trifles, that influence that might be profitably exerted in the far higher aim, of obtaining for ourselves as a profession, the estimate and the respect of the world.

It cannot be expected that society will aid us, unless we aid ourselves, unless we root out those evils that we alone can deal with; that we purge ourselves of the imputations of littleness, and throw ourselves on the highest resources of our profession.

We may point to the grandest discoveries in general science, or to the practical deductions of the profoundest philosophers and mathematicians without envy, we may marvel at the triumphs of human intellect, manifested in the recent discovery by Le Verrier and Adams of the planet Neptune, the nature and existence of which, was deduced from its recognised obedience to the Newtonian law of gravi- tation, and constituting one of the most sublime examples of