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mysterious barrels at the tiny circular theatre lying below. Then there is the technical part to be learned, the cutting and staining of sections of tissues and the mounting of slides.

   It was about at this time that I had one of the great experiences

of my medical education, although I recently checked with my embryology professor and discovered that the experience must have been in part hallucinatory. It had to do with the origin of pulsation in the developing cardio-vascular system. You may know, Inspector, that the foetal blood vessels form on the yolk of the fertilized ovum and that they branch and grow until, at the site of the future heart, the primitive vessels [?] together, clasp, fuse, to form the right and left sides of the heart. These in turn modify and break through to become the four chambered heart of man, two auricles and two ventricles. There the blood is sent into the lungs by the right ventricle and is returned, oxygenated, to the left ventricle from which it passes into the left ventricle and out to the periphery through the aorta returning to the right auricle it goes back to the right ventricle to repeat the oxygenation process. But note that all of this stems from the activity of a few cells which function as the "pace-maker," the instigator of the cardiac construction. All this multiplication and differentiation of embryonal cells, all this [?] tingling of developing life has gone on, up to a certain point, like vegetative growth, complicated but [?] so to speak, a mute destiny locked within its chromosomes. And then, at that magic, that mysterious moment, those interlocking embryonal blood vessels must twitch, tremble in their strange, gelatinous developing. Yes, Inspector, they must flicker feebly as they are caught up in their great future. And there it must be like the first chiming of a great bell, but intense, divine. And he twitching becomes regular, rhythmic, and soon the whole new organism has become [?], permeated with the gift of pulsation, and a new human has come into being.

   I don't remember how this was demonstrated to  us, but however it

was presented, the diagrams, slides, words - it kindled my imagination with the same pulsation and I have never forgotten it. It was worth all the tedium of memorizing which characterized the first two years of medical school. Have I made this the least bit clear to you, and if so,