of the question, however, there occurs the
folowing passage:

"Let us picture to ourselves an infirmary
where many of the wards are without tables,
even for the dinners; where the medicine
bottles are kept in a mass at the end of the
ward with the food; where there are no
prescription cards over any of the beds; where the
sole medical officer, in addition to the cares of
his private practice, has to perform, unaided, the
whole medical service of about three hundred
and forty sick patients, besides an equal total
number of imbeciles and infirm——prescribing for
them, dispensing for them, and being solely
responsible for their entire medical care; being
non-resident, and without either assistant or
dispenser. Let any human being, who will
calmly consider the case, suppose the position
of patients in such a state of affairs: the medical
officer having, in the course of the time which
he can daily spare for his round, some three
hours, to pass through all the wards, to carry
in his memory the actual treatment employed,
say for the three hundred and forty patients
only, to determine what changes are necessary,
to remember the alterations which he desires to
make, and then set to work in his dispensary to
send up. the medicines. If the wretched state
of the patients consequent upon the inevitable
and entire failure of any one man to perform
duties so extravagant were not terribly tragic,
there would be something almost ludicrous in
the assumption of the guardians that these poor
sick people- could possibly be tended by the
ignorant (and usually lazy and vicious) pauper
nurses under such a system. It is not to be
wondered at that, in such an infirmary, abuses
of the most saddening character are the rule
rather than the exception."

When we know that the workhouse doctor
is everywhere overworked, that the workhouse
nurse is everywhere incompetent or scanty, that
decent comforts for the sick are scarcely ever
provided, that the occasional external cleanliness
is the cleanliness of a whited sepulchre, it is
surely time for the legislature to intervene
between the sick poor and their so-called
"guardians," who err, probably, in most cases, more
from ignorance than from cruelty. The question
is one of great importance to the public, on
grounds of utility as much as on grounds of
humanity. While the sick do not get well, the
sound languish, and children pine and dwindle,
among the noisome smells, the confined
atmosphere, the unscientific diet, and the intolerable
monotony, of workhouse life; and all these evils
are of the most costly character to the community.
A labouring man, working at a distance from
home, falls ill and is sent into the house. There
he either dies, or at best makes a tedious and
imperfect convalescence, which still leaves him
unable to maintain his family. His wife and
children follow him; the first to lose all self-
respect and self-reliance, the latter to exchange
the liberty, and the comparatively wholesome
dirt of the street and the gutter, for the
confinement and the unwholesome dirt of
a place from which they at last emerge,
verminous and blear-eyed, with stupid faces,
cadaverous skins, and shambling walk, unwilling
to labour, unable to learn, and only fit, paupers
themselves, to be the parents of paupers like
unto them. If the father had chanced to go
into a voluntary hospital, his family and the
public might have been spared this evil and
this cost. If the original sufferer were not a
man, but a girl——some poor servant sent to the
workhouse by her employers as soon as disease
attacked her——then we can only draw a veil over
the probable consequences of her admission,
and say that sometimes, perhaps, death would
be a greater mercy to her than recovery.

In conclusion, we have only to mention the
waste of material for teaching medicine which
the present system involves. The cases
admitted into a workhouse infirmary are types and
patterns of those met with in daily life. In a
voluntary hospital the cases are above the
average of severity, they are discharged if they are
found to be incurable, and large classes of
disease are altogether excluded. A young
surgeon or physician who has been educated, at
unusual cost, entirely at a hospital, may have
distinguished himself greatly in some departments,
and may enter upon practice with a high
reputation, without having ever seen a case of
measles or of whooping-cough, without being
familiar with the treatment of many of the
slight maladies that make up so much of the
sum of human discomfort, and without having
any practical bedside knowledge of the methods
of relieving and palliating a variety of chronic
and incurable ailments. These deficiencies
would not exist if workhouse hospitals were
available for the purposes of medical instruction.
To make them available, they must be raised
from their present state of dirt and squalor,
and must be made to approximate, in cleanliness,
in diet, in nursing, in medical and surgical
attendance, to those noble hospitals, which are
as much a national glory as our workhouses are
a national disgrace.

SIXTY YEARS' CHANGES.

AMONG the happiest hours of my happy youth
were those spent at a farm-house in Devonshire,
near the mysterious mountain called Blackinstone,
a huge granite tor, on whose top stands
an enormous separate crowning stone, of which
tradition says it was flung there by the Devil
from Moreton Hampstead, being the result of
a game at quoits, to which he was challenged
by some bold fellow——they called him Dr.
Faustus——who denied or doubted his satanic
power, but whose defeat and humiliation are
testified by another granite quoit, weighing
some tons, which lies half way in the valley
between the town and the tor. Its shape no doubt
closely resembles that of the stone which his
infernal majesty lodged safely on the Blackinstone's
head. .

The heathery, furzy, stony ridge of Dartmoor