Commencing with small beginnings, carefully developed
and improved, that system now brings up for examination as many as seven
thousand scholars in the subject of human physiology alone. I can say
that, out of that number, a large proportion have acquired a fair amount
of substantial knowledge; and that no inconsiderable percentage show as
good an acquaintance with human physiology as used to be exhibited by
the average candidates for medical degrees in the University of London,
when I was first an examiner there twenty years ago; and quite as much
knowledge as is possessed by the ordinary student of medicine at the
present day. I am justified, therefore, in looking forward to the time
when the student who proposes to devote himself to medicine will come,
not absolutely raw and inexperienced as he is at present, but in a
certain state of preparation for further study; and I look to the
university to help him still further forward in that stage of
preparation, through the organisation of its biological department. Here
the student will find means of acquainting himself with the phenomena of
life in their broadest acceptation. He will study not botany and
zoology, which, as I have said, would take him too far away from his
ultimate goal; but, by duly arranged instruction, combined with work in
the laboratory upon the leading types of animal and vegetable life, he
will lay a broad, and at the same time solid, foundation of biological
knowledge; he will come to his medical studies with a comprehension of
the great truths of morphology and of physiology, with his hands trained
to dissect and his eyes taught to see.
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