limitations.  On the other hand, and nowadays especially, he is too apt to be one who, after brief hospital work of general character, or without this, takes up, as we say, the eye, ear, throat, or uterine organs.  Unless he has had at some time a larger and more varied experience, or unless he is a most unusual man, he is prone at last to lose sight in his practice of the fact that eye, ear, and womb are parts of a complicated mechanism, and suffer through its general or local disorders.  Hence the too common neglect of constitutional conditions, to which are often due the apparent maladies of the organs to which he devotes himself.  Moreover, in certain of the organs of sense, as the eye, are frequently seen the very first signals of spinal or other maladies, and if, as too often happens, he sees in some such sign or symptom only the evidence of a local trouble, and neglects to look or reason beyond it, he may inflict on his patient the gravest penalties, by depriving him of the chance of early treatment of some serious disease, involving lifelong, or even fatal, consequences.  This is a criticism on the man and his training, not on the system of specialties which has become invaluable.

A reasonable desire to seek aid from physicians of usefully limited values is another test of the good family physician.  I know of men who are in the habit of saying that they dislike consultations and get little good from them.  As compared to those who too commonly subject people to the expense of fresh advisers, they are the more dangerous class.  Apt enough in cases of acute disease to bring into the case some one to share responsibilities which seem grave because near at hand, they continue to treat chronic cases they do not understand, because there is no crisis of pain, disability, or danger to bring them to reason.

Hitherto I have dealt most with the intellectual outfit needed for the best practice of medicine, but the criticism I have just made brings me on more delicate ground.  The man who feels himself so competent that his self-esteem forbids him to seek advice when he knows and must know he has come to the end of his reasonable resources, lacks the humility which belongs to larger natures, and he, too, is a man to avoid.

Be sure that the physician cannot he a mere intellectual machine.  None know that better than we.  Through all ages we have insisted that he shall feel himself bound by a code of moral law, to which, on the whole, he has held without question, while creeds of more serious nature were shifting and changing.  What the Greek fathers of medicine asked of him we still ask of him to-day.  He must guard the secrets wrung from you on the rack of disease.  He is more often than he likes a confessor, and while the priest hears, as I have once said, the sins and foibles of to-day, he is as like as not to have to hear the story of a life.  He must be what About calls him, “Le tombeau des secrets,”—­the grave of secrets.  How can he be too prudent or