happy in this renewal of their acquaintance with him; for our own parts, we hope he will, on his arrival forthwith, publish a full account of all his adventures during this last voyage. He must now be pretty well initiated into the ways of the booksellers, and we do not see why Mr Campbell should not succeed as well in his transactions with that slippery generation, as many other authors of greater pretension.

THE MEDICAL SCHOOLS OF DUBLIN * AND EDINBURGH.

WE wish the young writer of this pamphlet had been content to give us a fair statement of the advantages Dublin affords for the study of medicine these are known to be very great, and, for the benefit of the art, as well as for the credit of this rising school, they deserve to be made more generally known. He might then modestly have left it to his readers to form any and what comparison they chose, between the Irish and other universities. He was willing, however, to lend his assistance, and has favoured us himself with a "Comparative View" of the two schools, which happens to be merely a laboured recommendation of his native city, and a very petulant illiberal depreciation of Old Reekie. The annual accouchement of this venerable mother of so many physicians, was last August so happy and prolific, that some jealousy and displeasure seems to have been excited in the sister kingdom. It is true that, with the assistance and close attendance of six professors, she produced one hundred and three tolerably fine doctors! Immediately a young Irishman, running to his desk, sits down to shew the age and infirmities of this old creature, and remarks, with some patriotism, on the superior attractions of a rare young beauty, who challenges admiration from her repose beneath the Wicklow mountains. In the second page of his preface, occurs a first misrepresentation, and that a very gross one: "For some years back," be it known,

"the reputation of Edinburgh, as a medical school, has been losing ground, in proportion as that of Dublin rose (has risen); so that, at the present day, its diploma scarcely holds the same rank which a Dublin one formerly possessed." The truth is, that, on the Continent, a Dublin diploma is not perhaps sufficiently valued, for there as yet it is scarcely known, whilst that of Edinburgh has lost none of its reputation. Cabanis speaks of this school as "justement renommée pour la reunion singulière, et la succession non interrompue de professeurs distingues dans plusieurs genres differens." In London, Dublin is deservedly esteemed as a medical school, owing chiefly to the high character of its present Anatomical Professor, who lectured some years on comparative anatomy at Guy's Hospital; but elsewhere in England, we know the general opinion to be as yet decidedly in favour of an Edinburgh diploma.

We offer some remarks on the two schools, in the order observed by this young writer.

Anatomy. This chair in Dublin is most ably filled by Dr Macartney. His knowledge of comparative anatomy renders his lectures more than commonly useful; he has added to the museum some rare and valuable preparations, and has had the merit, with the late Dr Gordon, of making known the doctrines and writings of Bichat, the young Parisian Haller, and one of the most philosophic of medical observers. Dublin offers a fine school of practical anatomy. The graves in this city are so frequently made to render up their dead for the dissecting rooms, that subjects are plentiful, and comparatively cheap. In Edinburgh, they are generally procured from London. The Scotch,

quiet and regular during life, are singularly averse to any disturbance after death; and the firing which is kept up against the atmosphere during in dead, keeps at a distance all friends night in those churchyards, most rich to a premature resurrection. Anatomy being best learned by dissection, we confess that Edinburgh must allow the superior advantages of Dublin. Yet, besides the Professor's class, that of Dr Barclay, with his fine museum, the demonstrations of Mr Fyfe, with

VOL. IV.

lectures in this school. We thought they would have been noticed in this impartial view, but Dr Barclay and Mr Fyfe are both forgotten.

Chemistry.-Edinburgh is fortunate in her chemical professor. No where, we believe, are the experiments conducted more successfully, or with so splendid an apparatus; and from no chair, we are sure, can chemical doctrines be more clearly explained. Dublin is happy in having this department well conducted; but with regard to the privilege of making experiments in the Professor's laboratory, this can never be allowed when the class is numerous. We fancied the name of Dr Murray, and the chemical discoveries of Mr Leslie, would have been remembered with respect in this Comparative View." They are not mentioned !

Botany. There are two botanic gardens in Dublin. One of them, belonging to the Dublin Society, is large and very beautiful. Some eighteen months back, the Society were at pains to render it entirely useless to students, except as a delightful place for promenading. It was not allowed to any one but the Society and their friends to step from the gravel-walks, and tread on the turf, to walk to the flower-beds, so that stamina and pistils were to be counted through an opera-glass. A A gardener, passionately devoted to whisky and authority, whose face no eastern blast ever made pale, strictly enforced this dandy mode of studying botany. We hope this good man has been gathered to his fathers, and the Dublin Society become more hospitable to the feet of students. The other and only efficient garden is that belonging to the college. This is a very good one, though we think not so well furnished as the one at Edinburgh. Its gardener gives a very cheap and useful course of botanical demonstrations, and the Professor sets a good example to the Scotch school, in teaching after the method of Jussieu, whose natural system renders botany most interesting, and something better than a dry nomenclature of the vegetable kingdom.

Materia Medica.-This chair cannot be better filled in either school; but in both, a laboratory, with an operative pharmacien, seems requisite to render the lectures practically useful. At Edinburgh, it is much to be

lamented, that not even specimens of the raw drugs are handed round, nor are they kept in a museum, as at the Ecole de Medicine at Paris, where the students may see and study them at leisure. From this want the professors' lectures lose half their value, and it seems a miserable misplaced economy, which will not second his endeavours to render this course, as much as possible, interesting and useful.

Practice of Physic.-On no medical brow are gray hairs so finely contrasted with the evergreen of a laurel chaplet, and on none are the wrinkles so completely hidden by its leaves as that of Dr Gregory. Few professors possess so perfectly the affection of their pupils; yet we continually pray in private that he would not divide his course, and be less diffuse on intermittent fevers.

Hospitals. In these galleries of the sick the medical artist must study the features and appearance of disease; it is here that he applies in practice the rules he has learnt in lecture rooms, and learns, by a skilful combination and prescription of his drugs, to produce "pictures of health." The hos pitals in Dublin are numerous, wellconducted, and easy of access. The lying-in one, in particular, is unique as a practical school of midwifery. We recommend to a student of the obstetric art to attend the lectures of Professor Hamilton in Edinburgh, the best course given on this subject in any school, and afterwards to attend for six months the Dublin lying-in hospi◄ tal.

We regret that, from the circumstance of the clinical professor and surgeons making their visit at the same hour of twelve, the only time in the day not occupied by college lectures, the physicians' pupils in the Edinburgh Infirmary are deprived of the benefit they might receive from its surgical wards. As a remedy for this evil, we venture to mention the example set by the chirurgien en chef, at the Hotel Dieu in Paris, who pays his visit exactly at six o'clock in the morning, winter and summer, and afterwards lectures on the cases. The chief physician at this hospital is there at nine o'clock, so that active pupils may attend both visits, without losing the lectures of their class at college. We know of no better plan than this early hour of visitation, to keep both

surgeons and their pupils in an enviable state of perfect health; and we are sure an Edinburgh surgeon would disregard his bed and its comforts, on the coldest morning, for the advancement of his art, and the reputation of his native city. No medical school can afford better opportunities of surgical instruction than in the clinical lectures of Mr Russel, those of Professor Thomson, and Mr Allan; yet this maker of comparisons mentions none of them!

Libraries and Societies.-We wish that when Mr Brougham has done with public charities, he would sift the abuses which disgrace the management of college libraries. The one at Dublin is kept in a laudable state of cleanliness; the book-cases are bright with varnish, and the books are arranged therein with all imaginable neatness. Yet if it were burnt to the ground to-day, to-morrow not ten students would feel the loss of it. The college library at Edinburgh is infinitely less clean, and rather more useful, still it is chiefly a professors' library. No student loves frequently to wait an hour before he can procure a book from one of the sad-looking beings who attend to receive demands;-two melancholy men, who seem bewildered and lost in their literary catacombs. No folios, nor books of plates, nor music books, are allowed to be given out; why then is not comfortable accommodation provided, that the students may read and study in the room, as in the advocate's library, or in that of the writers to the signet?

The medical society will be startled to hear of their own importance, and of the weight borne by themselves and their libraries. We are told, that "their books, and the bringing students together, prop up the school!" Scarcely one fifth of the medical students in this city, belonging to the medical society, were ever propped up by its books, or know or care any thing about its proceedings.

Examinations.-Under this head, we have some very puerile observations, on the practice which prevails amongst the medical students here, of submitting to private examinations by a graduate of the university, before their trials in presence of the professors; this has got the name

of "grinding." Every college has its grinders; at Gottingen, Blumenbach himself was grinder-general; at Dublin, the students examine, or grind, each other, and, when their number is sufficiently great to induce the attention, and employ the time of regular tutors, this useful system will be as quietly established, and as much encouraged there, as it has been in Edinburgh. No young man of sense would omit such a preparation, which gives him confidence to speak Latin, and collects his scattered knowledge into a manageable form.

The medical schools in Europe, which are at present rising in reputation, are those of Dublin, Paris, Vienna, and, we may add, Pavia, where resides the celebrated Scarpa. Edinburgh derives not perhaps its present character so much from the name of this or that professor, as from its being known as a place of education admirably fitted to form a young mind to habits of literary study and application. It is of some consequence that a young man should commence his college education, where opportunities of corruption are comparatively few, where the society of his fellows shall excite his emulation, and where he may, without a blush, be at once moral and laborious. the general literary classes are open to every student, without any university forms, except the necessary one of paying the professor's fee. A love of labour is so general, and some sort of useful occupation so common, that one is ashamed not to be industrious like other people; and none but the privileged worthless idolaters of stays and stiff neckcloths, are idle and contemptible.

In this city,

The medical student who desires to excel in his profession will wish to study exclusively, neither at Edinburgh nor Dublin; he will, if possible, visit other cities, and gain information from the most celebrated of other schools. It is of little consequence to his future fame and honour at which of them he graduates. A diploma is but a written dismission from the professor's leading strings. The firm step of matured knowledge must be gained by long labours, and practice in after years, and his growth in skill and experience should end but with life.

OF AN INSTRUMENT TO HEAR BY THE

EYE AND TO SEE BY THE EAR.

MR EDITOR,

THE translator of that very agreeable volume, "The Lives of Haydn and Mozart," who is himself a professor, has risked a fanciful speculation in his note on the Oratorio of "The Creation," wherein he would prove "the power of musical sounds to express visible objects." To exemplify his theory, he describes the opening of "The Creation," which hitherto sublime, would, according to the whimsical description he gives, be as ludicrous to hear as it is to read. The subject has been discussed in a very lively manner in the Quarterly Review, No XXXV., and has occasioned some profound reflections in your twentieth Number, in which the distinct qualities of sound and colour are skilfully discriminated.

The extravagant inventions of men of genius are always amusing, often useful; and it is for this reason they well deserve their chronicle; there is so much wisdom in their folly. Anciently, he who could not multiply, as the art of making gold was termed, often found, in the eternal search, something equivalent in value. When the Reviewer says, "This power of expressing colour by sound is, we believe, a new discovery;" and when your correspondent in shewing, amidst their analogies, what must ever remain incompatible in their powers and their natures, neither of them appears to have recollected the history and the fate of Pere Castel, a genius of the most fertile imagination, who was carried away by the same fancy as the author of "Sacred Melodies," but went a little deeper. He passed his life in one dream, among some others, on the music of colours and the colours in music, and in constructing a piece of mechanism, or chromatic harpsichord, which ruined him as fast as it amused him. By the contrivance of this ocular harpsichord, to be played to the eyes, he proposed that the deaf might feel and judge of the beauty of music by his eyes, as well as the blind might judge by his ears of the beauty of colours; for Pere Castel applied the reciprocal powers he offered a silent music, or harpsichord of moveable colours, to the deaf, and a concert of colours, by

blending musical tones, to represent prismatic harmonies to the blind.

But the truth is, he was the inventor of an invention which never was invented, to adapt our style to our subject; it was rather a thing in theory, than a theoretical thing, for he himself appeared never to have been able to play his music one way or the other, but this new and old machinery, perpetually altering and repairing, and to which he devoted an apartment, appeared like a heap of sketches which were not yet made into a whole piece; the colours, varied to infinity, were combined scientifically, and, catching the reflections from mirrors lighted up by wax lights, made so extraordinary a spectacle, that a deaf man, if he could not imagine he saw a concert, might feel as distracted as if he had been lost in a prismatic world composed of rainbows.

In all this, there was not so much folly as there appeared. Pere Castel was an admirable geometrician, and had he only given the first design, and explained the principle, he might have left to some amateur the pleasure it could afford. He had shewn the analogy of sounds and colours, and how well they agreed in their degrees; and in this he was sanctioned by Newton's discovery of the seven primary colours, being proportioned to the seven differences in the musical strings; but he could never contrive to affect the eye by an ocular harpsichord, with the power that an acoustic harpsichord affects the ear. He could not make our feelings experience, by two opposite directions, a sensation equal to one another ;-in a word, he could not make us hear by the eye, as well as we could by the ear. However, in pursuing his fanciful theory of colours, he acquired many important discoveries; so that in attempting the impossible, he often produced the useful. Fontenelle said of him, when told that he was mad,—“ I know that very well, and it is a pity; but I like him better quite original and a little mad than if he were very sage without originality."

After all, Pere Castel scarcely deemed himself an inventor, even of his beloved ocular harpsichord. With an honesty few inventors have shewn, he tells us, that the origin of his instrument and his theory, was picked up among

the innumerable curiosities to be found in Kircher-that immense collector of human inventions, in whose volumes half the things that may yet be discovered lie already. I do not care to load your columns with heavy extracts, and I hope you will not differ with me in opinion, that it is better to refer to an author, than to quote him without mercy; but I shall quote PERE CASTEL just enough to shew you the man.

"Kircher calls sound, the ape of light, and boldly advances, that whatever is rendered sensible to the eyes, may be so to the ears; and reciprocally, whatever is the object of hearing, may become the object of sight."

He then adduces his proofs.

We have glasses to make distant objects near; and has not Kircher taught us to make instruments for distant hearing-I mean speaking trumpets, now called English trumpets, invented by Sir Samuel Moreland, who invented them thirty years after Kircher had ? We have microscopes to distinguish the minutest objects; and do you not know that we have microscopes for the ear, to distinguish the smallest and inarticulate sounds? And has not Kircher taught us to make ear-trumpets, by which the deaf collect the weaker sounds? And the speaking apartments (like the whispering gallery of St Paul's) which the same author describes, are these not auricular microscopes, by which we can distinguish sounds far too distant for us otherwise to catch? Why, therefore, I thought, in pursuing the thread of this analogy, why should we not make ocular harpsichords, as we make auricular ones? It is also to Kircher that I owe the birth of this delightful notion; I read his Misurgia' about two years ago, and I found there, that if, during a fine concert, we could see the air agitated by the various impulses excited by the voices and the instruments, we should

be all astonished to see it sparkle with the most lively colours, and the best assorted; this is one of those ideas which I call the seeds of discovery. Judge if I did not seize on it rapidly, with the taste which I have for every thing which advances the arts and sciences; and if I did not hasten to expand and ripen it, but this at leisure. For we must not think that a perfect discovery is struck off at once, and by a sort of chance, as a volatile wit said the other day, who assuredly never made one, except it occurred by chance."

Enough now of this scientific, fanciful, and original genius, for such was PERE CASTEL; a great admirer of Newton, and a Fellow of our Royal Society. I recommend to the curious his Dissertation, entitled "Clavessin pour les yeux."

X.

NOTICES OF THE ACTED DRAMA IN

LONDON.

No. VII.

IT is unnecessary to explain the circumstances which prevented us from resuming this article at the commencement of the season. The best apology we can make for this apparent remissness will be to do our best to make up for it now, and endeavour to avoid it in future.

We would willingly have proceeded, without further preface, to speak of the novelties (so called) which are occurring; and then, if space had been left us, have recurred to what has passed during our absence. But we are half disposed to make these Notices a little more serious than they have hitherto been; and, little as lamentations are to our taste, we cannot do this without uttering a short one over the fallen greatness-the apparently irrecoverable degradation, of that once noblest portion of our national literature, the Acted Drama.

It cannot be denied that England,this birth-place of the genius of the modern drama, and once the favourite of her dwellings,-where the most beautiful of all her temples had been erected, and from whence she was wont to shed the light of her countehas at last been quite deserted by her; nance over the whole civilized earth,and has become a stagnant fen from which nothing now arises but blinding mists, noxious exhalations, and meteors that do not even dazzle, but only lead astray. Those temples have been worse than closed or destroyed: they have been converted into dens for wild-beasts, and marts for moneychangers. The altars have been thrown down-the incense scattered-the shrines polluted and profaned-and thegolden images broken in pieces, to be mixed up with earth and dross, and then cast again in the moulds of the self-love, or what is worse, the self-interest, of a set of paltry pretenders, who have neither talent to invent, judgment to borrow, or skill to com

A living critic has somewhere said of the Lake school, 66 they break in pieces the golden images of Poetry to cast them again in the moulds of their self-love:" In admiring this fine image it is needless to add that we totally dissent from the opinion it inculcates.