injudiciously conferred may sometimes have some little effect of this kind it would surely be absurd to deny, but that this effect should be very considerable I cannot bring myself to believe.  That Doctors are sometimes fools as well as other people is not in the present time one of those profound secrets which is known only to the learned.  The title is not so very imposing, and it very seldom happens that a man trusts his health to another merely because that other is a Doctor.  The person so trusted has almost always some knowledge or some craft which would procure him nearly the same trust, though he was not decorated with any such title.  In fact the persons who apply for degrees in the irregular manner complained of are, the greater part of them, surgeons or apothecaries who are in the custom of advising and prescribing, that is, of practising as physicians; but who, being only surgeons and apothecaries, are not fee-ed as physicians.  It is not so much to extend their practice as to increase their fees that they are desirous of being made Doctors.  Degrees conferred even undeservedly upon such persons can surely do very little harm to the public.  When the University of St. Andrews very rashly and imprudently conferred a degree upon one Green who happened to be a stage-doctor, they no doubt brought much ridicule and discredit upon themselves, but in what respect did they hurt the public?  Green still continued to be what he was before, a stage-doctor, and probably never poisoned a single man more than he would have done though the honours of graduation had never been conferred upon him.  Stage-doctors, I must observe, do not much excite the indignation of the faculty; more reputable quacks do.  The former are too contemptible to be considered as rivals; they only poison the poor people; and the copper pence which are thrown up to them in handkerchiefs could never find their way to the pocket of a regular physician.  It is otherwise with the latter:  they sometimes intercept a part of what perhaps would have been better bestowed in another place.  Do not all the old women in the country practise physic without exciting murmur or complaint?  And if here and there a graduated Doctor should be as ignorant as an old woman, where can be the great harm?  The beardless old woman indeed takes no fees; the bearded one does, and it is this circumstance, I strongly suspect, which exasperates his brethren so much against him.

There never was, and I will venture to say there never will be, a university from which a degree could give any tolerable security that the person upon whom it had been conferred was fit to practise physic.  The strictest universities confer degrees only upon students of a certain standing.  Their real motive for requiring this standing is that the student may spend more money among them and that they may make more profit by him.  When he has attained this standing therefore, though he still undergoes what they call an examination,