Thou hast won from me my silver treasure;
Thou of all my flocks art now possessor,
I am thine! thine am I soul and body!"

THE FACULTY.

THE simple Highlander who came weeping
to his commander after the battle of
Preston Pans, lamenting that the watch, which
was his share of the plunder from the
vanquished English, had " died that morning,"
meaning that it had stopped, was not so far
wrong in his generation after all. A man resembles
a watch in very many respects. It would be
but a sorry pun to adduce first, in support of this
position, the old Latin saw, Homo Duplex—
thereby intimating that a man is like a watch
with a duplex movement. Yet there are duplex
men; and those who go on the horizontal and
on the lever principle. Some of us are
jewelled in many holes, and have ruby rollers
and escapements of price, yet are contained in
humble silver or pinchbeck cases; while the
trashy, ill-constructed, worse-going sets of
works have gorgeous envelopes, cases of
embossed gold, radiant with enamel and
sparkling with gems. Did you never know
an engine-turned man ? Men who were too
fast or too slow ? Men who, being
frequently in the watchmaker's hands for regulation,
go all the worse for it afterwards?
Men who, if neglected, were apt to run down
and play the deuce with their insides ? Are
not men as often pledged as watches, and as
seldom redeemed ? Are there not as many
worthless men as watches appended with
sham Albert chains, and showy, valueless
breloques ? Has not an old-fashioned watch
an unmistakable likeness to an old-fashioned
man? Are there not ladies' men and ladies'
watches; hunting men and hunting watches;
men and watches that are repeaters; watches
and men that you can set tunes upon, and that
will go on tinkling the same tunes with sweet
and unerring monotony over and over again, as
often as you like to wind them up. And is not,
finally, a man in this much like a watch, that,
finished, capped, jewelled, engine-turned,
wound up, and going (to speak familiarly)
like one o'clock; in the pride of his beauty,
the accuracy of his movement, the perfection
of his mechanism, the flower of his age—one
slight concussion, one hasty touch, one
wandering crumb, one accidental drop of moisture,
will silence the healthful music of his pulse,
and paralyse his nervous hands, and leave
him a dumb, senseless, piece of matter
prone to go to rust, and fit only to be taken to
pieces, to form the component parts of newer,
braver watches? Yet a man will bear mending
almost as often as a watch. You may
take his interior almost out, and give him a
new case, a new face, new hands. But when
the man-spring is broken, it cannot, like the
main spring, be replaced.

If you will concede the resemblance of
humanity to watchwork, you will not deny
the likeness of the doctor to the skilful artisan
who repairs watches. There is no such
person, strictly speaking, as a watchmaker: the
brightest mechanical geniuses of Cornhill,
Clerkenwell, and the Palais Royal do not make
watches; they merely collect their separate,
already-made parts, and put them together.
They also tinker and examine, clean, and
regulate, improve and strengthen. So with the
doctor: he is the human watch-mender. He
knows the component parts of the machine,
and when it is going right or wrong. He
mends, adjusts, strengthens, and occasionally
spoils us. As some watch workmen make dial
plates, some springs, some wheels, and some
hands—so some doctors attend to the limbs,
some to the digestive organs, some to the
brain, some to the liver, and some to the skins
of humanity.

I have the highest respect and reverence
for that medical aggregate commonly
called The Faculty, and I hope that
none of its members will be offended with
me for drawing a comparison between
the art of healing and the art of watchmaking.
For, although the two professions
do seem to run parallel, there is a point
where they diverge widely and for ever;
where the mechanist of mere inanimate discs
of metal must keep in the beaten track of
his trade; but where the doctor stands forth,
another Mungo Park, to explore the sources
of the Niger of Life; where he journeys into
unknown countries, and valleys full of shadows
to make discoveries as strange as Marco
Polo's, to undergo vicissitudes as
wondrous as Sale's, and as perilous as
Burckhardt's, and as fatal as Captain Cook's. The
Faculty has had its pioneers, its explorers,
its trappers, its apostles, and its martyrs.
For centuries, energetic and enthusiastic men
have devoted the flower of their lives and
the fruitful harvest of their genius to one
great object. At this moment there are
hundreds of men passing the hours that
we squander, in patient application,
unwearied study, and profound meditation—
applying, studying, meditating upon the site
and foundations, the walls and roof, the beams
and rafters, the very bricks and laths of that
house of life of which so few of us have long
leases, which so few of us take the commonest
precautions to keep in habitable repair, which
so many of us wantonly injure and dismantle,
nay, sometimes burn down altogether with
combustible fluids, or run away from, taking
the key with us without paying the rent.

The Faculty has a literature of its own—a
ghastly literature, illustrated by a hastlier
style of art—as Mr. Churchill's shop, and
the library and museum of the College of
Surgeons can show. The Faculty has its
newspapers, its monthly and quarterly
journals, its philosophers, essayists and humorists;
but where are its historians? When are we
to have the history of The Faculty? Not a