taught in our institution. I therefore on behalf of the Faculty extend to you the hand of friendship and professional fellowship. How we have discharged our duty remains for you to say; how you have discharged yours, we may be able to judge up to the present, but that great unknown future with its yet unwritten page remains to show whether our seed has been sown in good ground. Should you on the reception of those small pieces of parchment conclude your labors ended, we shall have worked to little purpose; on the contrary, should you wisely decide that you have but laid the foundation, but gotten ready the photographer's sensitive plate to receive future impressions, and are determined to make gradual and steady progress in your profession from this day forward, we shall feel as if our object has been attained, and that we have discharged our duty toward you.

We would not claim for our institution, through means of those small pieces of parchment, the magic power to turn out perfect M.D.'s, full panoplied like Minervas from the head of Jupiter, but we trust that we have succeeded in laying for you a foundation upon which, with proper future work on your part, a superstructure grand and majestic in proportions may be reared.

In the selection of Medicine for your calling, I trust you have made no mistake, fully appreciate its great responsibilities, and have carefully calculated the vastness of the undertaking. The field spread out before you as scientific medical men, is broad and boundless as a beauteous prairie teeming with the richest and rarest flowers, and it remains for you to cull and wreathe the rarest and most lovely into garlands with which to deck your future victorious brows.

You will find in the study of medicine everything calculated to expand your higher mental faculties, and in its practice all to try your nicer sensibilities, tender sympathies, self-possession, acuteness of observation, and moral courage.

The proper study of mankind is Man made in the image of his Maker, and only a little lower than the angels. He has dominion over the animal, vegetable and mineral kingdoms; they were made to contribute to and to minister to his wants and necessities. The world itself even was made for him.

While the crystal in its sparkling beauty caps the pyramid in the inorganic world, Man crowns the summit of all greatness in the organic world, and the light of his genius like that from the renowned Pantheon comes alone from above. What fitter or grander calling than to wield that genius in behalf of our suffering fellow mortals?

It is a pleasing thought that perhaps we may be able to add one link to the mysterious chain of life, stretching like the sensitive cord of an Eolian harp 'twixt the cradle and the grave, and responding to every physiological, psychological, or pathological zephyr which may chance to touch it. Where in the vast realms of Nature can you find a subject for study more grand or glorious?

Will your fancy lead you with Morse to rend the eternal thunders, and with fiery tongue send lightning whispers around the world? Look first within yourselves; charge that great nervous battery, the brain, with the lightning of the mind, and will through the delicate, sensitive and motor nervous system, this face to smile with affection or this arm to contract with anger, and you have a human telegraph as wonderful as he.

Would you with the alchemist dive deep down into the bowels of the earth, and with the assistance of Hermes seek to convert the baser metals into gold, or wrench from your tortured crucible the all-powerful philosopher's stone? Change your pursuit to something more practical and useful, and the world-renowned Leibig will point out to you more of interest and beauty in the chemico-vital changes taking place in the process of digestion, or in the wonderful revolution wrought in the blood while passing through the capillaries of the lungs, by which the dark vinous blood coming from the right side of the heart is, as if by magic, robbed of its impurities and changed into the bright, life-giving arterial current.

Or would you prefer to go with that ripe scholar, Matthew F. Maury, and lay your hand familiarly upon the ocean's hoary mane, e'en down into the fathomless depths, and trace the meanderings of that warm current, the gulf stream, flowing from its cauldron in the Indian Ocean, washing our Atlantie coasts and the banks of Newfoundland adown the British

Isles to its southern home again, and view with delight and admiration the changes of climate, the transfer of vegetation and the revolutions of commerce which dot the world of waters?

After you shall have sufficiently admired the beneficence of Providence there and the genius of your gifted companion, turn with Harvey and Galen to the consideration of that great hollow, muscular organ, the human heart, placed like an immense Corliss engine within the thorax, and momentarily beating like muffled drums our funeral marches to the grave! Trace the meanderings of the blood as it flows dark and purple from the right side of the heart to the pulmonary capillaries, then loses its impurities, and rushes on in its blushing beauty back to the left side of the heart, thence distributed throughout the system to every cell and tissue of which the complex body is made, thereby supplying each with their proper pabulum vitæ and regulating their temperature, health and strength. Well may we exclaim, " roll on thou dark and deep blue ocean, roll!" upon whose azure brow Time writes no wrinkle, and whose white caps seen dimly in the distance appear as ghosts of departing sea gods, after having made ruthless shipwrecks of man's proudest hopes. Yet in all thy restless domain no subject is presented grander or more glorious for contemplation than the human heart and its bright current freighted with an argosy of health and life as it bounds through our veins.

While Herschel with his telescope may sweep the brow of night with her bright diadem of stars, making new worlds of the faintest ray of light within the nebulæ, and calculating with mathematical precision the vast distances in illimitable space, the ophthalmologist of today with his ophthalmoscope can penetrate and view the innermost recesses of that delicately, yet wonderfully and beautifully constructed organ, the human eye, and tell with a positive certainty its healthy or diseased condition, as if it were lying open before him.

The expert physical diagnostician by means of percussion, auscultation, and the stethoscope, can tell the healthy or diseased condition of the heart or lungs locked up and hidden in their bony cartilaginous casements, with as much certainty as if exposed to view.

In fact, gentlemen, the world's indebtedness to our profession can never be liquidated. If we had never done anything else than give humanity the practical use of chloroform and ether, by which an eternity of pain has been avoided in capital surgical operations, we would have bankrupted their gratitude; but we have not stopped here.

If you are ambitious for the applause of assembled thousands as they hang enchanted upon the burning thoughts as they issue in tones of fervid eloquence from your parted lips, you have made a mistake, for no crowded forum is to be the scene of your triumphs.

Do you long for that renown that follows the brave and chivalric leader of embattled hosts, whose patriotism lights the flashing of his burnished blade, as the charge is sounded to avenge his country's wrongs? You have made a poor selection, for to you is left the sad duty, amid the smoke and gloom of carnage, of binding up the bruised and broken limbs which vaulting ambition has scattered so ruthlessly around.

Does your sordid fancy lead you to contemplate a life of ease and opulence, decked in purple and fine linen, the friend of money kings, ruling the business world with a magic, golden wand, and causing embarrassed nations to bow the knee in suppliance to Midas? Stop in your golden dreams, for alas! ye have always with you the bending form of age bowed with the weight of poverty-stricken years to plead, trumpet-toned, for your assistance, and the lonely hovel, where death, disease and want hold high carnival, far oftener than the palatial home bids you enter.

You will in your daily rounds meet frequent calls of charity which will deplete your purse, with no eye to commend save that of the needy recipient and that of Him who notes the fall of every sparrow to the ground.

From what you have already seen, if you are not deeply interested in the science of medicine, determined to make progressive medical men of yourselves, you will certainly deteriorate and never get beyond calomel and quinine doctors. It behooves you to keep pace with our advancing work and our daily efforts to make of medicine a more exact science. You must not only be thoroughly conversant with the recent

standard medical works daily issued from the press, but you must subscribe for and keep upon your office tables a few of the best medical journals now published. Let your companions be good books and periodicals from which you may derive much pleasure and learn something useful; in this way you may avoid that giddy maelstrom, society, where so much valuable time and talent is squandered. Let your loafing places be your offices, where you may be found in emergencies, and an observant public will soon learn it.

Remember that it is not so much the amount of information men acquire as that which they retain, properly digest, harness, and make practical use of, which counts in this world. This is eminently a practical age and ideas to prove effective must show harness marks upon them. In order to properly classify and retain at your command your information for future uses, it is well to keep an "index-rerum," and you will be surprised what a rich fund of useful knowledge may be acquired in a short lifetime.

Every progressive medical man should keep a note or case book and record therein, in brief, all cases of interest coming under his observation, group them, and at stated intervals give his professional brethren the benefit of his observation and experience through some first-class medical journal. A cardinal principle among the working members of the profession is that we are one family working for the common good, and it is the duty of each of us to add our mite to the general fund of information. The habit of recording cases will soon make you more critical in your examinations and add greatly to the accuracy of your observations, thereby making expert diagnosticians of you, which is half the battle won.

Much professional reputation may be acquired by well-written articles and carefully-reported cases of interest in firstclass medical journals, as it is the legitimate channel through which you should make yourselves known to the profession outside of your home locality. Upon the truthful and accurate observations of its working members most of our profession rely for its basis in the treatment of diseases, hence none save the inhuman and mercenary charlatan would withhold anything of value from the regular profession.