Gen, McC. Seven minutes, Mr. President—­those are all I can spare.  Good evening, gentlemen.

* * * * *

LITERARY NOTICES.

BORDER LINES OF KNOWLEDGE IN SOME PROVINCES OF MEDICAL SCIENCE.  An
Introductory Lecture delivered before the Medical Class of Harvard
University, Nov. 6, 1861.  By Oliver Wendell Holmes, M.D., Parkman
Professor of Anatomy and Physiology.  Boston:  Ticknor & Fields. 1861.

It is a pleasant thing to realize, in reading a work like this, how perfectly GENIUS is capable of rendering deeply interesting to the most general reader topics which in the hands of mere talent become intolerably ‘professional’ and dry.  The mind which has once flowed through the golden land of poetry becomes, indeed, like the brook of Scottish story, more or less alchemizing,—­communicating an aureate hue even to the wool of the sheep which it washes, and turning all its fish into ‘John Dorees.’  And in doing this, far from injuring the practical and market value of either, it positively improves them.  For genius is always general and human, and rises intuitively above conventional poetry and conventional science, to that higher region where fact and fancy become identified in truth.  And such is the characteristic of the lecture before us, in which solid, nutritive learning loses none of its alimentary value for being cooked with all the skill of a Ude or of a Francatelli.  Many passages in the work illustrate this power of aesthetic illustration in a truly striking manner.

In certain points of view, human anatomy may be considered an almost exhausted science.  From time to time some small organ, which had escaped earlier observers, has been pointed out,—­such parts as the tensor tarsi, the otic ganglion, or the Pacinian bodies; but some of the best anatomical works are those which have been classic for many generations.  The plates of the bones of Vesalius, three centuries old, are still masterpieces of accuracy, as of art.  The magnificent work of Albinus on the muscles, published in 1747, is still supreme in its department, as the constant references of the most thorough recent treatise on the subject—­that of Theile—­sufficiently show.  More has been done in unravelling the mysteries of the faciae, but there has been a tendency to overdo this kind of material analysis.  Alexander Thompson split them up into cobwebs, as you may see in the plates to Velpeau’s Surgical Anatomy.  I well remember how he used to shake his head over the coarse work of Scarpa and Astley Cooper;—­as if Denner, who painted the separate hairs of the head and pores of the skin, in his portraits, had spoken lightly of the pictures of Rubens and Vandyck.

Laymen can not decide, where doctors disagree; but there are few who will not at least read this lecture with pleasure.

JOHN BRENT.  By Major Theodore Winthrop. 
Boston:  Ticknor & Fields. 1862.