You complain for instance of my old friends, the homeopathists. I grant you it is provoking to see a former patient smacking his lips over their Barmecide therapeutics. But, after all, they are less exceptionable, personally, and less dangerous than many other wholesale theorists. Then look for a moment at the course which the system follows in almost any community. It appropriates a certain predisposed fraction of the public, and having made converts of them for a longer or shorter period, its power is mainly exhausted in that locality. And what are these predisposed subjects? Many are simple and credulous, some are intellectual and cultivated, not a few of eminent social standing; but with rare exceptions they are just exactly the most restless, uncomfortable class of patients the physician has to deal with, poets with bilious fancies, divines whose medical opinions are offered as gratuitously as your advice is expected to be given; philosophical dilettanti who insist on being dissatisfied with the only kind of answer a reasonable patient should expect.

All that class, in short, who, instead of pulling the ropes as they are bid when there is a heavy gale and a lee shore, Insist on going aft and breaking the eleventh commandment

"No conversation with the man at the helm !

On the whole, if our friends, who have a perfect right to choose their own names will spare us that little impertinence of calling medical practitioners "allopathists," the profession

"Opium makes one sleep because it possesses a soporific virtue, the nature whereof is to allay the senses.'

is well off to have no worse antagonists. The next fancy that turns up may not be as harmless. The old brown rat of England was bad enough but by and by the gray Hanover rat came and ate him up. Unfortunately he ate up the cheese and the bacon, too, and a great deal faster than the old practitioner had done before him.

We may be well contented then. If we have one man living among us as much loved and esteemed as ever a physician has been; if we have one man who makes his calling as remunerative as any have ever done in the midst of us, we may be sure there is no lack of respect or reward to all who deserve either. If our most obvious antagonism comes in a comparatively inoffensive shape and with very limited powers of aggression we need not complain of our professional position.

Count in the published lists all that practice the healing art in this great centre of population and who stand outside of your fellowship; all that trade in the fantastic pretences of the many counterfeits that infest the outskirts of medical practice; the eclectics, the mesmerists, the botanics, and the rest; rake all the dark alleys where the advertising sharper lurks behind his half-open door and his alias; count everything, male and female, red, white, and black, clean and unclean, and though the catalogue is freely open to every knave and ignoramus it will be short compared to the list of the names which you enroll among your numbers from the same community. Weigh the amount of character, ability, and knowledge represented in this list against the string of obscurities and more odious notorieties in the other, and you may judge if health or life are anything to your fellow citizens, what place we must hold in their regard.

"Hi regebant fata," these governed the fates, said the

Natural Historian of ancient Rome speaking of physicians. Governed the fates! Yes, and not only the fates of those that were under their immediate care but often through them the fates of empires and of interests wider and deeper than those of any earthly dynasty. Think of Dubois the elder, when the question was trembling in the balance whether France should be without an empress or her imperial master without an heir! Or go back to that bloody day of Saint Bartholomew and look into the royal assassin's chamberwhom will you find there, hidden from the savage clubs and the crashing guns that were filling the streets with victims, while the bells of St. Germain l'Auxerrois were pealing their death notes to the hunted Huguenots? No brother, guilty of believing the detested creed; no mistress whose blood was tainted with the stain of heresy; no favorite leader in arms, or council who had dared to defend the obnoxious faithfor Coligny's white hairs were the first to be dabbled in their blood; not one of these but the wise old man to whom Charles the Ninth once owed his accursed life; for the divine art sheds its blessings, like the rain, alike on the just and the unjust; the good and great surgeon, too good and too great for such a crowned miscreant, our own old patriarch of chirurgery-Ambrose Paré.

Say, come down to nearer times and places, and look into the chamber where our own fellow citizen struck down without warning by the hand of brutal violence lies prostrate, and think what fearful issues hang on the skill or incompetence of those who have his precious life in charge. One little error, and the ignis sacer, the fiery plague of the wounded, spreads its angry blush over the surface and fever and de lirium are but the preludes of deadlier symptoms. One slight neglect, and the brain oppressed with the products of

disease grows dreamy and then drowsy; its fine energies are palsied and too soon the heart that filled it with generous blood is stilled forever. It took but a little scratch from a glass broken at his daughter's wedding to snatch from life the great anatomist and surgeon, Spigelius, almost at the very age of him for whose recovery we look not without anxious solicitude.

At such an hour as this more than at any other we feel the dignity, the awful responsibility of the healing art. Let but that life be sacrificed and left unavenged, and the wounds of that defenceless head, like the foul witch's blow on her enchanted image, are repeated on the radiant forehead of Liberty herself and flaw the golden circlet we had vainly written with the sacred name of Union!

"Dii, prohibite minas! Dii, talem avertite casum.'

I give you, Mr. President, "The Surgeons of the city of Washington-God grant them wisdom, for they are dressing the wounds of a mighty empire and of uncounted generations."

TRIBUTE TO PAUL MORPHY

DELIVERED AT PUBLIC BANQUET HELD IN BOSTON, MAY 31, 1859

E have met, gentlemen, some of us as members of

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a local association, some of us as its invited guests, but all of us as if by a spontaneous, unsolicited impulse to do honor to our young friend who has honored us and all who glory in the name of Americans, as the hero of a long series of bloodless battles won for our common country.

1"Ye gods forefend from the threats! Ye gods avert such a misfortune!"

His career is known to you all. There are many corners of our land which the truly royal game of kings and conquerors has not yet reached, where if an hour is given to pastime it is only in an honest match of checkers played with red and white kernels of corn, probably enough upon the top of the housewife's bellows. But there is no gap in the forest, there is no fresh trodden waste in the prairie which has not heard the name of the New Orleans boy who left the nursery of his youth like one of those fabulous heroes of whom our childhood loved to read, and came back bearing with him the spoils of giants whom he had slain after overthrowing their castles and appropriating the allegiance of their queens.

I need not, therefore, tell his story. It is so long that it takes a volume to tell it. It is so brief that one sentence may embrace it all. Honor went before him and victory followed 'after.

You knew the potential significance and the historical dignity of that remarkable intellectual pursuit, which although it wears the look of an amusement and its student uses toy-like implements as did the great inventor of logarithms, Napier of Merchiston, in the well-known ivory bones or rods by which he performed many calculations, has yet all the characters of a science, say rather of a science mingled with a variable human element, so that the perfect chess player would unite the combining powers of Newton with the audacity of Leverrier and the shrewd insight of Talleyrand. You know who of the world's masters have been chess players; happy for the world had some of them been nothing worse than chess players! You know who have celebrated the praises of the art in prose and verse; among them the classic Italian remembered in those lines of Pope: