ingly that not only do women deserve to be thus employed, but that it would be vastly to the advantage of the country if they received preferentially such public employments. All honour to the Post Office authorities for this merited recognition!

In the assimilation of telegraphic codes, instructions, and regulations, the Post Office teachers have otherwise deserved well of the public. In numerous and well-directed schools of telegraphy, open to all applicants duly qualified, they extend the knowledge of one of our "liberal" arts, and promote the exertion of tact, ingenuity, and perseverance.

It

In spite of all effort, however, to prevent them, there must be complaints, there must be grumbling. But the complaints against the Postal Telegraph, we are happy to say, are not numerous in proportion to the business done; for if every complaint received by the authorities were well founded, and this, of course, is not the case, there would actually be but one complaint to every 600 messages. The authorities contend that not above one-half of the complaints received by them are well founded as against themselves. In the other half, the fault is proved to be either with railway stations acting for them, or with foreign lines to which the messages are handed over, or, finally, with the public themselves. appears also that the instrument itself will sometimes commit a blunder on its own account. In signalling, letters are represented by groups of dots and dashes; and if the instrument fails to convey a dot or a dash, as it sometimes will, or substitute a dot for a dash, or vice versâ, as it sometimes will, it may materially alter the message, and the result may become provokingly ridiculous. Thus, a gentleman telegraphed from London to his brother in the country to send a hack to meet him at a station. Now the signal for h is four dots, and the perversely comical instrument sent only three dots, which form the signal for the letter s. Consequently, when the gentleman arrived at the station, he found a sack waiting for him! In this case, however, if he had asked for a horse instead of for a hack, the blunder would have been corrected, as the receiving clerk would have been able to make nothing of the word sorse.

Again, a firm'in London telegraphed, "Send rails ten foot lengths." The signals for t and e are a dash and a dot, but the instrument sent two dots, which form the signal for i; the consequence was that the message was delivered thus:

"Send rails in foot lengths." In this case, if the senders had been less chary of their words, and had written, "Send rails in ten foot lengths," which would have cost them no more, the blunder would probably have been corrected.

On this score generally we cannot do better than quote the feeling words of Mr. Scudamore in his valuable Report: "The public would help themselves and us very much it they more often wrote legibly, if they used only plain words of ordinary acceptation, and if they were careful always to use the full number of words required to give a grammatical construction to their messages. Taking all these things into account, however, I am forced to admit that we do too frequently commit most annoying and irritating blunders. Telegraph clerks do their work in a very mechanical fashion, and too often have little more care for the messages which they are writing out than a compositor has for the phrases which he puts into type."

In such an institution it is the design and organization that give it a claim to be classed among the most remarkable achievements of "subtle brains and lissom fingers"; and to Mr. Scudamore and his worthy assistants the nation is indebted for this great accomplishment to which their successors have been enabled to extend immense development during the last five years of its increasing prosperity. For the knowledge of these results, however, we shall have to wait until the publication of a second report on the working of the Postal Telegraph, which, it is to be hoped, will emulate by its excellence that of Mr. Scudamore, to which we are indebted for the interesting facts of our article, as the Post Office authorities have made it a rule not to give any information on the subject otherwise than by "Report presented to Parliament."

HOSPITAL DISTRESS.

THE foreigner who looks into the advertising pages of the morning papers, cannot fail to be struck with the apparently bankrupt condition of our London Hospitals. Day by day a column and a half of most urgent advertisements assure the public that, unless immediate aid is given, half their wards must be shut up. Side by side with these begging appeals are to be found others, equally pathetic, imploring aid for the completion of hospitals the necessity for which is more than doubtful.

But let us ask, in sober calmness, what is the cause of the growth of "charitable" bricks and mortar, and what is its tendency? To read the carefully worded advertisements, it would appear that hospitals, in the metropolis at least, were erected solely on the behalf of suffering humanity; and that the more we build, the better for society. Any one who knows anything of the working of our metropolitan charitable institutions, is fully aware how far this is from the real—and we must add, in too many cases, the vulgar-truth. It is noticeable that most of our new hospitals are dedicated to the treatment of special diseases; and it is further observable that most of these have originated in the energetic action of some individual. The germ of such buildings is the Dispensary. An energetic surgeon makes up his mind to step to fame and fortune by means of bricks and mortar. But, first of all, he must hit upon some striking specialitythe "Dispensary for the Treatment of Inverted Eyelashes," for instance. A quiet house is taken in a side street, patrons and patronesses are canvassed for, and in an incredibly short space of time a goodly sprinkling of the aristocracy have been found to pledge themselves to serve suffering

humanity and Mr. in the matter of inverted eyelashes. There is an annual list of subscribers, and the accounts are of course audited; but possibly a more searching inquiry than dilettante auditors are likely to give would prove that Mr. in his account with poor humanity has much the best of it. This goes on for a certain number of years, when it is found that eyelashes are becoming inverted in alarming numbers; indeed, there are carefully got up statistics to prove that every tenth person is suffering from this terrible disease, the study of which needs a larger sphere than the Dispensary, with its 20,000 (!) cases per annum, can possibly afford-in short, the dispensary bud must expand into a hospital. There are certain persons who seem to have been born only to be manipulated out of their money for the erection of new hospitals. It may be incontestably proved that inverted eyelashes can be treated in the old-established hospital close at hand; but that fact seems never to have entered the thoughts of the gentlemen and ladies who so obsequiously follow the lead of the ambitious Mr., who is determined that there shall be a building devoted to nothing but misplaced eyelashes, and perhaps but this is of course quite under the rose-to himself.

In due course of time, the special hospital is completed. The old woman who used to sweep out the Dispensary is converted into the proud hall-porter; the small table in the back room is developed into the ample board-room; the matron and the house-steward stand in respectful attitudes; and Mr. is proudly conscious of the pinnacle of human greatness that he occupies (in his subordinates' eyes at least), when the Board become perfectly conscious that the "establishment" is eating up all their means, and that, unless "a charitable public," etc., come forward, thousands of inverted eyelashes will be left to their miserable fate. Such is the history of half the special hospitals at present existing in the metropolis. Founded in the grossest selfseeking on the part of some individual, they are matured only through a system of mendicancy already strained to the uttermost, and which sooner or later must give way.

But let us ask,—Do these special hospitals subserve to the education of pupils? Most decidedly not. Their tendency is to starve the general hospitals, where the schools are established, of that variety of cases which is so instructive to the future practitioner. Moreover, this splitting up of

specialities with a more than Egyptian minuteness, has a tendency to destroy that unity of disease which the philosophic mind should always keep in view. The hospitals for inverted toenails and for inverted eyelashes may turn out clever operators in their very confined departments of surgery; but they will never furnish great surgeons, or advance the art beyond mere manipulative smartness.

There are certain large specialities, of course, to which our argument does not apply; but these exceptions must be patent to the reader. It is in surgery, more than in medicine, that we have erred in this respect. Independently of the scientific and educational evidence against these trivial special hospitals, there is the one great financial reason, that they squander the means of the charitable. Every one of these petty hospitals has its working staff, besides the building itself, the expense of keeping up which, in many cases, is the chief charge which tender-hearted and humane people are called upon to pay. It is this useless multiplication of machinery which is tending to exhaust the purses of the charitable, and to bring the principle of voluntary contribution into bad odour; and we most heartily hope and trust that our great provincial cities and towns will, in this respect, look upon our London practice as a matter to be avoided, rather than to be servilely followed.