Note 7 — ESSAY I. THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT OF THE AGE.

While I am writing these pages, the Globe informs us that there reigns at present in Paris a mania for medical curiosities and surgical operations. “It has become the right thing to get up early and hurry off to witness some special piece of dexterity with the scalpel. The novel yields its attraction to the slightly stronger realism of the medical treatise, and the picture galleries have the air of a pathological museum. It is suggested that the theatres, if they want to hold their own, must represent critical operations in a thoroughly realistic manner on the stage.”