0"T' LAERT> "! - USP

INDIA. II
man of wisdom and acquires friends, renown, virtue, riches
and other desirable things." On certain days the pupil
should not study, for example on the 8th, 14th and 15th
days of the new and full moon ; it was likewise forbidden
him to study " in the morning or evening twilight, during-;
thunder and lightning (when this happens at an unusual
period of the year), when the king of the country is laid up
on a bed of sickness ; after a visit to the scene of a con­
flagration, after attending a burial, during war, on any high
festival, during any alarming manifestation of Nature such
as an earthquake or meteoric shower, or on such a day as
the Brahmans themselves might select on which to abstain
from study, or which he might himself consider polluted for
any reason."
In these sometimes strange rules there lay obviously at
bottom a reasonable notion, namely to secure to the
students the relaxation and leisure necessary to their call­
ing, as well as to remind them that when their attention is
given up to other things they understand in only a super­
ficial and incomplete way what they are taught. SuSRUTA
further demands (Chap. 3) that the students of medicine
should receive both theoretical and practical training : first
they should read medical treatises and then learn the prac­
tice of the.art. "The man who has had nothing but a
theoretical training" says he "and is unskilled in the
details of treatment knows not what to do when he comes
to a patient and behaves himself as pitiably as a coward on
a battle-field. On the other hand a doctor who is only
practical does not win the esteem of the best men." " Both
these classes of incompletely prepared doctors are not
fitted for practice, any more than a Brahman is to perform
Church ceremonial properly if he has only read half the
Vedas or than a bird is to soar in the air if it has only one
wing. For, if medicines are administered by an unskilful
doctor they may—although like nectar in flavour—work
like poisons or other instruments of destruction."
• Such people, as SuSRUTA remarks, only obtain permis-