a select library of books, relating to his own profession, I discovered the collection contained in the subsequent pages. The articles were written on detached scraps of paper, carefully pasted, with some small pretension to alphabetical order, into an old folio copy of Hippocrates, and appear to have been gleaned from a miscellaneous and rather extensive course of foreign and domestic reading.

Whether they were intended for publication at some future period, or were merely the amusement of long winter evenings, passed in a state of seclusion from society, or if they were undertaken to beguile the languid hours of declining health, are circumstances which cannot now be ascertained. The obscurity of the author's name precludes the possibility of his reputation being injured by their present appearance; while the eventual chance of their sale may, perhaps, assist in alleviating the distress of a sole surviving female relation, whose means of existence his death has tended considerably to curtail.

EPISTLE DEDICATORY.

After having remained during the usual period assigned for study at the University of Edinburgh, and passed the customary preliminary examinations without censure, my late friend regularly received the degree of M. D. He afterwards sojourned a winter in London, and another on the Continent.

With an ample fund of professional reading, corrected and verified by careful attention to the practice of various public hospitals, and possessed of a liberal and independent mind, combined with gentle and endearing manners, the natural delicacy of his constitution, together with a not unamiable diffidence of his own talents, combined to make him prefer the attempt to obtain a decent competence in a respectable country market town, to the arduous struggle required to secure professional eminence in the me tropolis. But even these humble hopes. were never realized. 940 3.1.1

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When the moon of vaccination, first illumined this hemisphere with her orient

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horns, the prejudices of education, and some leaning (natural enough in a bachelor) towards the misogamic doctrines of Malthus, who absurdly considers a super-abundant population as an evil, made him start some doubts respecting the ultimate benefit likely to accrue to the human species from the blessed discovery. This opinion afforded his brethren, who wisely looked to present profit from the novel practice, ground to raise the cry of prejudice against him, which had the effect of greatly depressing his naturally too delicate spirits.

Rumours to his disadvantage were also industriously circulated through the medium of a dashing Surgeon, Apothecary and Man-Midwife, who was moreover a

Vide the hieroglyphic in the title-page of one of Dr. Lettsom's pamphlets on this important subject, where the learned Doctor has copied from Bryant's Mythology a print of the Deus Lunus, or Egyptian Mnevis, bearing a crescent on its shoulder, converting the bull into a cow, as an emblem of vaccination,—thus slily insinuating that this practice was well known to the ancient Egyptians; and only revived by Dr. Jenner.

EPISTLE DEDICATORY.

vii

Cornet of fencible cavalry, and who did all 'the medical trade of the neighbourhood. He of course laid all the ladies, who were -flattered by his morning calls, when returning from drill, mounted on a prancing Icharger, dressed in scarlet regimentals laced with gold, his cranium bedecked with an umbrageous plumed helmet, and his bold obstetric fist supported by a terrific sabre in a sheath of burnished steel.

It is perfectly natural, that the person, by whose means a woman imagines that she is relieved from the painful pangs of -parturition, should possess considerable influence over her mind; and the propriety, with which all married ladies counsel their husbands in the choice of their medical monitor, is a point not to be disputed. Who, indeed, can have a nearer or more serious interest in a man's life and health than the wife of his bosom? and who better fitted to save that, when endangered by disease, than the person by whom she believes her own to have been so often saved?

In short, against the dress of the Cornet, the address of the Apothecary, and the gossip of the Gyn-andre or Man-Midwife, in union with a combination of all the Ladies initiated in the mysteries of the Bona Dea, my poor, modest, meritorious friend stood no chance. Now and then, indeed, he took a guinea from a nervous old-maid, or a superannuated bachelor. But, as the small quantity of business that fell to his share was not sufficient to occupy his attention, he gradually ceased to attend to the little he had; he discontinued to inquire after his patients, and they of course ceased to require his visits; he became melancholy and dejected; rarely stirred from the small apartment which contained his books, except in the evening, when he occasionally amused himself with watering a few plants that grew in the little garden behind his residence, or strolled by moonlight along the banks of the murmuring rivulet, which skirted its boundary. When the approach of winter superseded the ne

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