upon mercantile or manufacturing pursuits.  True, there are some imperfectly educated, but certainly not “six or ten per cent.” destitute of that knowledge taught even in American infant-schools, and without knowing, and without the statement “being founded on the authority of any official publication,” I infer that in Europe, owing to their “better methods,” similar knowledge is communicated to the average European child many months before its birth.

Next follows a comment on the poverty of the American medical student.  Dr. Wood says:  “Even worse than this, however, is the fact that the summer between the winter courses is often not spent in study, but in idleness, or, not rarely, in acquiring in the school-room or harvest-field the pecuniary means of spending the subsequent winter in the city.”  Alas! this is too true.  Providence seems to have ordained that our young American doctors are not always reared in the lap of luxury and wealth as the fittest preparation for the trials, hardships and self-denials of their future lives.  It is also true that some other young American professional men have been compelled “in the school-room or harvest-field” to acquire the means to prosecute their professional studies.  Daniel Webster, the son of a New England farmer, taught school at Fryeburg, Maine, “upon a salary of about one dollar per diem.”  “His salary was all saved ... as a fund for his own professional education and to help his brother through college.”  “During his residence at Fryeburg, Mr. Webster borrowed (he was too poor to buy) Blackstone’s Commentaries.”  Mr. Webster’s great rival, Henry Clay, also was compelled to resort to the “school-room and harvest-field to obtain the pecuniary means,” etc. etc. etc.  The son of the poor widow with seven children “applied himself to the labor of the field with alacrity and diligence;” “and there yet live those who remember to have seen him oftentimes riding his sorry horse, with a rope bridle, no saddle, and a bag of grain.”  “By the familiar name of the Mill-boy of the Slashes do these men ... perpetuate the remembrance of his lowly yet dutiful and unrepining employments.”  American biography is so filled with similar instances, showing how the great characters of her great men acquired their development and strength in the stern gymnasium of poverty, even in “the school-room and harvest-field,” that I could fill volumes with the glowing records.  The youngest American school-boy recognizes Abraham Lincoln and Henry Wilson in this American galaxy.  Whose heart has not been stirred by the life-story of the great Hugh Miller, the stonecutter’s pick earning for him humble means, thereby enabling him to acquire that learning which made his name a household word even in America.  Truth, then, as I have remarked, obliges me to admit that we have in our medical colleges some young men who labor “in harvest-fields and school-rooms” in order that they may honorably pay their way, rather than eat the bread or accept the gratuities of pauperism.