general laws that govern all fevers and all vital movements.  I ’ll tell you what saves these last fellows.  They go for weakness whenever they see it, with stimulants and strengtheners, and they go for overaction, heat, and high pulse, and the rest, with cooling and reducing remedies.  That is three quarters of medical practice.  The other quarter wants science and common sense too.  But the men that have science only, begin too far back, and, before they get as far as the case in hand, the patient has very likely gone to visit his deceased relatives.  You remember Thomas Prince’s “Chronological History of New England,” I suppose?  He begins, you recollect, with Adam, and has to work down five thousand six hundred and twenty-four years before he gets to the Pilgrim fathers and the Mayflower.  It was all very well, only it did n’t belong there, but got in the way of something else.  So it is with “science” out of place.  By far the larger part of the facts of structure and function you find in the books of anatomy and physiology have no immediate application to the daily duties of the practitioner.  You must learn systematically, for all that; it is the easiest way and the only way that takes hold of the memory, except mere empirical repetition, like that of the handicraftsman.  Did you ever see one of those Japanese figures with the points for acupuncture marked upon it?

—­I had to own that my schooling had left out that piece of information.

Well, I ’ll tell you about it.  You see they have a way of pushing long, slender needles into you for the cure of rheumatism and other complaints, and it seems there is a choice of spots for the operation, though it is very strange how little mischief it does in a good many places one would think unsafe to meddle with.  So they had a doll made, and marked the spots where they had put in needles without doing any harm.  They must have had accidents from sticking the needles into the wrong places now and then, but I suppose they did n’t say a great deal about those.  After a time, say a few centuries of experience, they had their doll all spotted over with safe places for sticking in the needles.  That is their way of registering practical knowledge:  We, on the other hand, study the structure of the body as a whole, systematically, and have no difficulty at all in remembering the track of the great vessels and nerves, and knowing just what tracks will be safe and what unsafe.  It is just the same thing with the geologists.  Here is a man close by us boring for water through one of our ledges, because somebody else got water somewhere else in that way; and a person who knows geology or ought to know it, because he has given his life to it, tells me he might as well bore there for lager-beer as for water.

—­I thought we had had enough of this particular matter, and that I should like to hear what the Master had to say about the three professions he knew something about, each compared with the others.