Proposals have recently been made to get rid of general examinations altogether, to permit the student to be examined in each subject at the end of his attendance on the class; and then, in case of the result being satisfactory, to allow him to have done with it; and I may say that this method has been pursued for many years in the Royal School of Mines in London, and has been found to work very well.  It allows the student to concentrate his mind upon what he is about for the time being, and then to dismiss it.  Those who are occupied in intellectual work, will, I think, agree with me that it is important, not so much to know a thing, as to have known it, and known it thoroughly.  If you have once known a thing in this way it is easy to renew your knowledge when you have forgotten it; and when you begin to take the subject up again, it slides back upon the familiar grooves with great facility.

Lastly comes the question as to how the university may co-operate in advancing medical education.  A medical school is strictly a technical school—­a school in which a practical profession is taught—­while a university ought to be a place in which knowledge is obtained without direct reference to professional purposes.  It is clear, therefore, that a university and its antecedent, the school, may best co-operate with the medical school by making due provision for the study of those branches of knowledge which lie at the foundation of medicine.

At present, young men come to the medical schools without a conception of even the elements of physical science; they learn, for the first time, that there are such sciences as physics, chemistry, and physiology, and are introduced to anatomy as a new thing.  It may be safely said that, with a large proportion of medical students, much of the first session is wasted in learning how to learn—­in familiarising themselves with utterly strange conceptions, and in awakening their dormant and wholly untrained powers of observation and of manipulation.  It is difficult to overestimate the magnitude of the obstacles which are thrown in the way of scientific training by the existing system of school education.  Not only are men trained in mere book-work, ignorant of what observation means, but the habit of learning from books alone begets a disgust of observation.  The book-learned student will rather trust to what he sees in a book than to the witness of his own eyes.

There is not the least reason why this should be so, and, in fact, when elementary education becomes that which I have assumed it ought to be, this state of things will no longer exist.  There is not the slightest difficulty in giving sound elementary instruction in physics, in chemistry, and in the elements of human physiology, in ordinary schools.  In other words, there is no reason why the student should not come to the medical school, provided with as much knowledge of these several sciences as he ordinarily picks up, in the course of his first year of attendance, at the medical school.