R. G.

Foreign Medical Education (Vol. viii., pp. 341. 398.).—In addition to the previous communications on this subject, I beg to refer your correspondent Medicus to Mr. Wilde's Austria; its Literary, Scientific, and Medical Institutions, with Notes on the State of Science, and a Guide to the Hospitals and Sanitary Institutions of Vienna, Dublin: Curry and Co., 1842.

J. D. McK.

Encyclopædias (Vol. viii., p. 385.).—Surely there must be many persons who sympathise with Encyclopædicus in wishing to have a work not encumbered and swollen by the heavy and bulky articles to which he refers: perhaps there may be as many as would make it worth the while of some publisher to furnish one. Of course copyright, and all sorts of rights, must be respected but that being done, there would be little else to do than to cut out and wheel away the heavy articles from a copy of any encyclopædia, and put the rest into the hands of a printer. The residuum (which is what we want) would probably be to a considerable extent the same. When necessary additions had been made, the work would still be of moderate size and price.

N. B.

Pepys's Grammar (Vol. viii., p. 466.).—I am unable to answer Mr. Keightley's Query, not having the slightest knowledge of short-hand; but I always understood that the original spelling of every word in the Diary was carefully preserved by the gentleman who decyphered it.

No estimate, however, of Pepys's powers of writing can be formed from the hasty entries recorded in his short-hand journal, and, as I conceive, they derive additional interest from the quaint terms in which they are expressed.

Braybrooke.

"Antiquitas Sæculi Juventus Mundi" (Vols. ii. and iii. passim).—The following instances of this thought occur in two writers of the seventeenth century:

"Those times which we term vulgarly they Old World, were indeed the youth or adolescence of it ... if you go to the age of the world in general, and to the true length and longevity of things, we are properly the older cosmopolites. In this respect the cadet may be termed more ancient than his elder brother, because the world was older when he entered into it. Nov. 2, 1647."—Howell's Letters, 11th edit.: London, 1754, p.426.