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is long. In these days anyone engaged in profession or trade has to keep pace with the times in everything bearing on his calling. The successful or rising man has to know everything to keep his place. The struggling unsuccessful majority—it may he superior to the successful minority—is wasted by the contest in endeavouring to fill the demand from an over-abundant supply. Fashions change, new ideas prevail, and the race for existence goes on with unchanged severity. Every nerve is taxed to meet the strain, and, should the human machinery give way, the ingenuity of medicine and the developments of surgery are present to supply the deficiency and repair the broken-down system. The demand for scientific treatment of complaints and disorders has, during the past fifty years, brought out competition for supply which is simply astounding. The advance of surgery and appliances during the Victorian era is marvellous. Strange as it may seem, the very changed habits of every-day life and the daily avocations in this new scientific world evolve complaints previously unknown, whose demand for treatment calls forth in the supply the greatest wonders of human ingenuity and sagacity. The effects of over-education, or high education, promote a species of nervous disorders, which call forth the efforts of science to adjust, on the inhabitants of our day. The present state of Europe is that of a slumbering volcano, which may at any moment break forth into an eruption which will convulse humanity. The entire position is the outcome of long intervals of peace, the cultivation of progress in all its branches of science, colonization, and national development. Distrust and want of confidence have engendered a deplorable issue, and with the growth of education and development an unfortunate element of social unrest has arisen which bids fair to blast the prospects and arrest the progress of civilization. Viewing the events in Europe during the last fifty years, with the growth of anarchy, socialism, and nihilism, we may well wonder whether we have not taken a cast back to the horrors and darkness of the middle ages, and whether all our progress and civilization, as contrasted with that of the middle ages, can have anything to
