take cognizance of these plants, and will consider them as a test of the condition of the atmosphere of the courts under his supervision.

The plants exhibited by the children of the different schools were generally grown from seeds. The stone of a cherry, or the pip of a lemon, or an orange dropped into the flower-pot, has engaged the anxious care of little urchins for months, and the result is a series of little seedling-trees. This may be a small matter horticulturally, but morally it is a large one. With the dropping of this little vegetable-seed in the earth there is also a dropping of good seed into the heart, which one day will bear good fruit. Side by side with the Flower-Show movement for the working classes is another, called "The Clean and Tidy Room Movement," and it will not surprise the reader to hear that many of those who carried off the prize for the best plant also gained the prize for the clean room. A great many prizes were distributed by Lord Shaftesbury, under a wide-spreading tree, in quite a patriarchal fashion, and possibly a ten-shilling prize for a well-grown plant may be the means of weaning many men from the habit of drinking and from the low tastes in which some of them indulge. We hear that similar working men's flower-shows are to be held this year in different parishes in London. We most heartily trust they will succeed. We hail them as a means of bringing together the different classes of

society, and also as a means of promoting a taste for pure and simple pleasures suited to the hearths and homes of working men.

DOCTORS' STUFF.

SCARCELY a more curious chapter in the history of events could be written than one which would trace the beliefs and fashions which have obtained among the community with respect to the use of medicines.. Taking up an old book the other day in a medical library, entitled "The Ladies' Dispensatory," we caught a glimpse of the ideas of our ancestors on this subject, which may compare-not much to our own advantage, we fear-with the practice of the big-medicine men of some remote African tribe. If our reader happen to have lived in the good old time—the Arcadian period of "Merrie England," when, according to romantic, writers, a few herbs and simples sufficed to medicine the ills which flesh was heir to in those robust daysa falling sickness," we find, would have been treated with any of the following recipes, or perhaps with a succession of them. "The blood of a weesil, to be drunk; the liver of an asse roasted, eaten fasting; an asse's hoof burned, to be drunk; the brine excrescence growing on the coronet of a horse's hoofe, bruised and drunk in vinegar; stones found in the belly of the swallows' first brood tied in a piece of buckskin and

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worn about the neck; cud of a sea-calf, to be drunk; gall of a beare; gall of a tortoise, put in the nose; storks' dung, drunk in water." These are recipes taken exactly as they come from the book of domestic medicine of the days of Cromwell. If we consult the prescriptions of the regular physicians of that day, we find the same spirit running through the loathsome messes they gave to their patients. The dung of all kinds of animals was a favourite pièce de resistance with them, and next to that their blood formed the staple of their nostrums.

There was a higher class of prescription, however, then in use, which was evidently aimed at the superstitious feelings of the poor people drugged. The moss from a dead man's skull is recommended for a patient by Sir Kenelm Digby; scrapings from human bones, poundings of a wolf's teeth, and even the hemp of a rope with which a man had hung himself, are to be found among the remedies prescribed less than two hundred years ago by learned Doctors of the College of Physicians. Our surgery was quite as bad. If a wound inflamed, a plaster of "new dung of oxen at grasse" would have been applied, fresh and fresh, from day to day. We find even We find even "verdigrease," a most virulent poison, recommended in a like case. God must have been very merciful to the afflicted in those days, for man, in his crass ignorance, was certainly very cruel. Errors of this kind are traceable in the use of remedies down to the middle of the eighteenth century.

After this time a marked amendment appeared in

the British pharmacopoeia. Drugs proper took the place of the disgusting refuse of animals, and the herbs of the garden gave place to medicines of a more potent nature. Prescriptions became less offensive, but we much question if they were quite as harmless as heretofore. The physician, as if to make up for the disuse of articles in his prescriptions calculated to strike terror into his patient's mind, loaded his recipes with every drug that he could well remember. Some of these prescriptions might almost be measured by the foot-rule, and often the ingredients were of so diverse a character that the object of the prescriber appears to have been to have aimed the remedy at his patient's complaint, as a timid householder would a blunderbuss at a robber, in the hope that some of the projectiles at least would hit.

We have got rid of these long prescriptions, it is true; but even at the present day the middle classes are bedrugged in a manner it is fearful to contemplate. The medical service of the country is mainly supplied by what is termed the general practitioner, -a gentleman who possesses the double licence of the College of Surgeons and the Apothecaries' Company. The latter Society is nothing more than a company trading in drugs, and of course it is their interest to increase the consumption of their staples as largely as possible. The general practitioner is entitled by the Apothecaries' Act to make certain charges for drugs sent to his patients, and this practice has now become general throughout the country.

The public are, we fear, wholly to blame for this

very objectionable practice. An attempt has been made by the medical profession to break through it by charging for time instead of physic-a much more sensible method of payment, and one calculated to save the patient from the infliction of unnecessary drugs; but this plan as yet has failed altogether, in the provinces at least. People, as a rule, like to be drugged; they prefer the practitioner who takes active measures; they like something, they say, for their money, and they unfortunately prefer to pay for the coloured bottles of stuff that come into the sickchamber with such alarming rapidity, to paying the medical man for his time and skill. In the larger towns the patients are more reasonable, and see through the absurdity of putting the medical man under the necessity of supplying drugs that are often hurtful to them.

As a general rule, however, the people like strong medicines, and will have them; hence the doctor, if he will live, must bow to the popular decision. The lower we go in the social scale, the stronger is its tendency to rely upon strong drugs to cure disease. We have only to glance over the pages of newspapers, to see the swarms of patent medicines which address themselves to the eye of the public. Every druggist thinks he is entitled to find out some specific for all the ills that flesh is heir to; and some gigantic professors in this art astound us by the magnitude of their operations. Mr. Holloway, to wit, sends out his pills by the ton weight; and Mr. Morison, with his gamboge boluses, is equal to a persistent diarrhoea