Mexican nation. In 1892, he was elected a member of the Mexican Academy.
Dr. Parra has written both in poetry and prose. Most of what he writes is in scientific lines. Even in poetry he is a scientist, and in a volume of his poems, we find odes to the mathematics and to medicine, a sonnet to a skull, and poems on the Death of Pasteur, Night, Water. Of very great importance is his Nueva Sistema de Logica, inductiva y deductiva (New System of Logic, Inductive and Deductive). He has written one novel, Pacotillas, in which the life of the medical student is depicted. It is from this work that we have drawn our selections.
López (Santa Anna), Robles (El Chango—“the monkey”), Albarez (Patillitas) and Tellez (Pacotillas), are fellow-students in the School of Medicine. They are friends but present four quite different types of character. Santa Anna figures least in the story and attends most strictly to business; Patillitas is a dandy, anxious to make feminine conquests; El Chango drops out of school