These are all practical questions—­questions of life and death, and every day will be full of just such questions.  Take the problem of climate.  A patient comes to you with asthma and wants to know where he can breathe; another comes to you with phthisis and wants to know where he can live.  What boy’s play is nine tenths of all that is taught in many a pretentious course of lectures, compared with what an accurate and extensive knowledge of the advantages and disadvantages of different residences in these and other complaints would be to a practising physician.

I saw the other day a gentleman living in Canada, who had spent seven successive winters in Egypt, with the entire relief of certain obscure thoracic symptoms which troubled him while at home.  I saw, two months ago, another gentleman from Minnesota, an observer and a man of sense, who considered that State as the great sanatorium for all pulmonary complaints.  If half our grown population are or will be more or less tuberculous, the question of colonizing Florida assumes a new aspect.  Even within the borders of our own State, the very interesting researches of Dr. Bowditch show that there is a great variation in the amount of tuberculous disease in different towns, apparently connected with local conditions.  The hygienic map of a State is quite as valuable as its geological map, and it is the business of every practising physician to know it thoroughly.  They understand this in England, and send a patient with a dry irritating cough to Torquay or Penzance, while they send another with relaxed bronchial membranes to Clifton or Brighton.  Here is another great field for practical study.

So as to the all-important question of diet.  “Of all the means of cure at our command,” says Dr. Bennett, “a regulation of the quantity and quality of the diet is by far the most powerful.”  Dr. MacCormac would perhaps except the air we breathe, for he thinks that impure air, especially in sleeping rooms, is the great cause of tubercle.  It is sufficiently proved that the American,—­the New Englander,—­the Bostonian, can breed strong and sound children, generation after generation,—­nay, I have shown by the record of a particular family that vital losses may be retrieved, and a feeble race grow to lusty vigor in this very climate and locality.  Is not the question why our young men and women so often break down, and how they can be kept from breaking down, far more important for physicians to settle than whether there is one cranial vertebra, or whether there are four, or none?

—­But I have a taste for the homologies, I want to go deeply into the subject of embryology, I want to analyze the protonihilates precipitated from pigeon’s milk by the action of the lunar spectrum,—­shall I not follow my star,—­shall I not obey my instinct,—­shall I not give myself to the lofty pursuits of science for its own sake?