of the deep water; but the courage of the Government failed, and the large sum of money spent in constructing the pier to less than a third of the distance required benefited no one but the contractors.

Each ward is furnished with fine luxurious baths made of that costly material, enamelled slate. These baths have been so made that they are useless and are consequently never used. When hotwater baths are required, old-fashioned wooden tubs have to be brought to the bedside, and with great expenditure of human labour filled and afterwards emptied. En revanche, on the ground floor is a spacious swimming bath, which is filled by a small steam engine with water from the sea. This is a great comfort to the Hospital establishment. In the same part of the building are vapour baths, but too far away from the wards to be of any use to the invalids. It was proposed to add a Turkish bath, but this has never got beyond the limits of good intention on the part of the authorities, although such an addition to the means of treatment would obviously be a great advantage to the sick.

A loop line from the main line of the London and South-Western Railway was constructed for the convenience of Government. The officers who were responsible for the proper carrying out of this necessary arrangement so contrived matters as to make the terminus nearly a mile distant from the Hospital, which necessitates the keeping up a detachment of the Army Service Corps, with wagons, horses, ambulance wagons, &c., to convey the sick and their baggage into the Hospital. By the exercise of a little common sense the railway might have terminated in the building itself, thus saving time, money, and much needless suffering to the sick brought from Portsmouth by rail. It is only in a British Government establishment that such absurd arrangements would be tolerated for an hour.

The Hospital was contrived for 1,080 beds, but only 1,002 can be occupied, and it is only for a few months in the year, when invalids arrive from India—that is, from the end of March to the beginning of July-that so many beds are in use for the sick. In the winter, as we have seen, one-half are appropriated to the time-expired men.

Still, with all these defects and shortcomings, which it is only fair and reasonable to state when dealing with the subject at all, Netley Hospital is one of those establishments of which we may be justly proud, and from which we may look for more than the mere direct result of healing the sick and wounded of the army. For being, as we have said, one of the finest military medical schools in the world, the education given there has raised the status of the army medical officer to a point of absolute equality with that of the combatant

officer, so that we may now hope to see the medical branch of the service as eagerly sought after by men of family with brains and the love of science, as formerly the fighting branch was affected by those who had neither.

We know of nothing more interesting than a visit to Netley Hospital. In Southampton itself we find such points of old-world charm as Anne Boleyn's house with its embayed and sunny windows where so many a whispered drama has been enacted, its thick oak door that has opened to so many hopes and shut against so many joys; St. Michael's Church, where Philip of Spain gave thanks to God for the safe passage and happy landing which were to cost the lives and happiness of thousands; the old Norman wall, with its sally ports and narrow winding streets built up against its huge girth, narrow and winding as those of an Italian village; while the floating bridge, which cuts you off from the other side at eleven P.M., and where the noise of the steam and the clattering of their feet on the moving. platform frighten horses of the sugarplum breed, leads you to Netley Abbey, one of the most beautiful ruins of the long past. At the Hospital itself countless objects full of pathos, of picturesqueness, of suggestiveness, of information, are to be found. There, sitting on the benches facing the sea and full in the sun, or wandering through the long corridors, are groups of the sick and wounded in their blue jerseys and lighter blue caps. Some are still pale and thin and bandaged; some are coughing ominously; but most are evidently "on the mend," if a few have that unmistakable look of the doomed who are waiting on time for death. Others, farther advanced on the good way and formed into a convalescent fatigue-party, are raking together the short sweet grass freshly mown on the banks. In the distance a red-coat makes a telling point of colour as he marches briskly down the long walk that leads between the green lawns; while the tents pitched to the back of the Hospital, filled with men at dinner, give a curious picnic kind of air to the scene. In the wards the most noticeable thing is the extreme order that prevails. squalor, no dirt, no poor bundles of private rags are to be seen, but everything is instinct with military precision-everything is clean and well set up, and the very sick are not unmindful of their old habits of discipline. Indeed, the order there is perhaps as perfect as anything human can be. A thousand men might be received without a moment's fuss or confusion; and half an hour after a whole batch of sick have been admitted it is as though they had been, each in his place, for days. Yet if we wanted any evidence as to the enormous traffic there must be in this Hospital, we need only look at that

No

heavily cased iron frontage to the stairs, telling as it does of the many feet that continually go up and down.

The Orderlies, with the red cross on the arm for hospital duty, tell us one or two of the most striking cases. It is thrilling enough for us civilians to feel in the presence of those who were face to face with the Zulus and the Afghans, and who came out of the fray with such sorry proof of the foemen's force as this bright-faced cheery boy for one can show. He was shot right through the lung, and the Orderly rolled up his shirt to show where the bullet had gone in and come out of the firm, white, healthy flesh. The lad himself seemed to think nothing of it, but laughed and showed his clear small teeth said he was all right-mending fast-and would have been sent on to his battalion to-day, but that the wound broke out afresh, and he was stopped. Another poor fellow had a far worse story to tell. A ball entered below the jaw and passed through the opposite temple, destroying both eyes, and his arm was shattered just above the wrist. A young fellow in bed, a strong, finely built man, was giving his surgeons and nurses grave anxiety. He had been wounded with an Afghan spear, and the wound would not heal. It almost looked as if the spear had been poisoned, for there was nothing in the mere wound itself, nor, so far as they could tell, in the lad's constitution to account for the persistent malignity of the sore. Three or four poor fellows were in bed with that sad, patient solemnity of dying men. For them that terrible question of time and death was narrowing to a very short span, and the hours might almost be foretold when all would be over with them for ever.

arm.

But far worse cases than were extant in the wards when we were there are to be seen commemorated in pictures and relics in the museum. Here is the ghastly picture of the torn stump of a man's At the battle of Waterloo it was shot away and badly crushed and mangled; but he galloped off to the hospital at Brussels and did not bleed to death. Here is the lance, broken and twisted, on which a lancer impaled himself. His horse was restive, and he was thrown forward on his weapon. When he looked behind him he saw the head of the lance sticking out at his back. They sawed off the shaft, drew out the head, and the man recovered and lived. Two men were at play fencing with sticks; one thrust the other through the nostril, and the game stopped. The hit man complained of pain in his head; he soon after became unconscious, and died in a few hours. No outward wound was to be seen, which made the strangeness of the thing, but after his death, on a post-mortem examination, the feruled end of the stick was found embedded in his brain. The most extraordinary

case, however, is that of a sailor who fell from the mast-head and broke his skull. The bones kept continually coming away until he had no bony case left at all—only the brain and the soft scalp. There is a wax figure of him at the hospital where he sat with the small bones of his skull gathered together in his hands-like a second and instructive Glengulphus.

There are many other things to see. To us outsiders it is interesting to watch a number of smart, well set up, handsome young fellows, in undress military uniform, with sleeves and aprons over their buttons and lace, working in the laboratory at the analysis of flour-whereof four sacks making 700 loaves are used daily; and of each new batch supplied to the Hospital a new analysis is made; or at the demonstration of the circulation of the blood by means of a newt's tail and a powerful microscope; or learning how to find a bullet by electricity--a bell ringing when the probe touches metal and silent when it only touches bone; or studying the best method of carrying an ambulance stretcher, and tending the wounded in the field; or verifying by the spectroscope the yellow band of sodium and the red and yellow bands of calcium. The sixty chemical pupils in the school when we were there are learning to do good work in their generation, and we honoured their sleeves and aprons. After two o'clock they may be in mufti, but undress uniform is de rigueur up to that time.

Then there are models of all kinds of death-dealing missiles side by side with all kinds of healing appliances-including a model of the ambulance volante, the grandfather of all the tribe, and the stuffed carcass of a famous mule who kicked and bit and was a fury in his lifetime, but "a good one to go," as we were told, and who died, happily before he had eaten a man—which was apparently the height of his ambition.

The pathological museum is very complete; the instruction given leaves nothing undone; the whole school reflects infinite credit on the professors and the profession alike; and in these circumstances would it not be wise in the Government to make the whole concern as complete as possible, so that this most important branch of the service might be filled by the best men, and the honour of saving life be as much coveted as that of destroying it?

E. LYNN LINTON.

A

"THE VENERABLE BEDE."

SHORT time since, I laid before the readers of this Magazine' some account of that precious monument of our early history, the English Chronicle. To-day, I propose to follow up the subject by a brief sketch of the life and works of Beda, the only real authority for the very first epoch of our national existence. Almost every child is familiar with the name of "the Venerable Bede," yet most persons even amongst the educated classes have apparently a vague notion that the bearer of that famous name was probably a mediæval archdeacon of about the twelfth or thirteenth century, like Geoffrey of Monmouth or Giraldus Cambrensis. But the real importance of Beda in the development of our literature and the transmission of our early history is so very great, that he well deserves to be better known by the ordinary English reader. And when we reflect that he is in all likelihood the first Englishman whose writings have come down to us-for the great epic which goes by the name of Cadmon is probably a spurious composition of later date-we can hardly fail to feel an interest in this "father of English learning," as Burke truly called him—this " teacher," as he seemed to the chronicler of Melrose, not only of the English, but of the universal Church."

Beda was an English monk of the eighth century, in the days when Teutonic Britain had not yet coalesced into the single kingdom of England. Three great powers, those of Northumbria, Mercia, and Wessex-the north, the midland, and the south-still divided between them the overlordship of the various English, Jutish, and Saxon communities between the Frith of Forth and the coast of Dorset. Minor kings or sub-reguli still ruled over the lesser Teutonic principalities. The Kelt still held half of Britain. At the date of Beda's birth the Northern Welsh still retained their independence in Strathclyde; the Welsh proper still spread to the banks of the Severn; and the West Welsh of Cornwall still owned all the peninsula south of the Bristol Channel as far eastward as the Somersetshire marshes. Beyond Forth and Clyde the Picts yet ruled over the greater part of the Highlands, while the Scots, who have now given the name of Scotland to the whole of Britain beyond the Cheviots, were a mere

See Gentleman's Magazine for May 1880.