Never permit fanciful theories or hobbies to bend your facts to suit their purposes, but force the legitimate deductions from the cases carefully observed, and truth must reign supreme.

Be scrupulously accurate in recording your observations, seeking truth rather than sensational notoriety. The matterof-fact Anglo-Saxon mind of today will be satisfied with nothing less.

As medical men, belonging to one of the learned professions, your responsibilities will be great and you should fully appreciate the force of your examples in the communities in which you live. Purity of character and temperance should ever characterize the true physician as the conservator of the health and confidence of his clientele, remembering that you deal with the physical frailties, the mental and moral weaknesses of humanity. Then be not gossips or scandal-mongers, but guard professional secrets when the reputation of others is involved as you would your own sacred honor or warm life's blood.

Be not too trusting or disappointed should you not always receive the countenance and support of those upon whom you may think you may have prior claims, for human gratitude oft proves a very uncertain quantity, is fickle, treacherous, unreliable, and if counted too strongly on, may turn to ashes on your lips.

You may sometimes find when you have exhausted all the resources of your noble profession, worn yourselves out mentally and physically in the vain effort to rob the icy fingers of death of the dearly-loved victim, ungrateful and unappreciative relations and friends will upbraid you, and say unkind things of you, unjustly accuse you of inefficiency, and even cast you off for another professionally your inferior. In such cases let me advise you if possible try not to manifest resentment or bitterness, but imitate the greatest of all Physicians in his persecution when he said: "Father, forgive them, they know not what they do."

Human nature is restless and fickle; clients will change doctors most unaccountably at times. Hence the only safe course for a medical man to pursue is to be honest with himself, striving by hard work and faithful discharge of duty to satisfy his own conscience. Your own consciences, gentlemen,

must be the compasses to guide you, as no living mortal deals more directly with his conscience and his God than the physician when ministering to the ills humanity is heir to.

Be true, brave men. Learn to look death squarely in the face unmoved, realizing fully the danger, stating it frankly to friends, and then trusting to Providence and the resources of your noble profession, struggle hopefully for results.

Endeavor to merit the respect and good will of all men, particularly that of your professional brethren, which is at last the crucial test of your professional ability, as they alone are capable of passing judgment on it.

Never object to proper professional consultations with gentlemen in the profession, or else you may be accused of attempting to hide your own ignorance. Be generous and even magnanimous to your professional brethren; have a kind word and helping hand for the worthy young man in the profession who is striving to make an honorable reputation and a living for himself. Turn a deaf ear to disparaging remarks flippantly made of your professional brethren, lest the same fate befall you when your back is turned. Arm yourselves with that true pride, which would scorn to do a mean thing, or attempt to rise Phoenix-like from the ruin of an unfortunate brother. Always encourage regular-organized medicine--and become working members of your local and State medical societies. Let your own good deeds advertise you, and not the public press. Pander to no man, but be polite, kind and courteous to all, but especially considerate to the old and infirm, from whom the fire and buoyancy of youth have departed, but whose bright hopes of the future, as the sunset of life approaches, shed their chief halo of glory above the horizon. Strive to maintain the present high standing of the regular profession, for upon you young men will devolve the duty of keeping the profession of America up to the standard of the German, French and British schools. I believe that the English-speaking medical student of today may get as good a medical education in America as anywhere in the world.

Now, gentlemen, as the result of a long professional experience, let me whisper audibly in your ears, that it is exceedingly good policy to try and stand in with two sets of people:

first, the women, because they rule the world; second, the doctors, because you are one of the same family.

Be not deterred, gentlemen, by the picture I present you, requiring almost Herculean efforts to make progressive medical men of yourselves. Be assured, however, that eternal vigilance and untiring, systematic labor can alone bring permanent professional success, and a lifetime thus spent will find no cause for tears, like Alexander, for lack of new worlds to conquer, but rather a boundless sea spread out before us, and we, as little children, wandering along its shore, casting pebbles which cause only momentary ripples upon its expanded surface.

Remember, however, with fair minds, brave hearts, indomitable wills, and untiring energy, "labor vincit omnia." For mark the little toilers of the sea, the tiny coral. Far beneath you in the scale of being, they toil on day by day and year by year, until what was at first but a speck beneath the surface of the deep, arises an island like "Citheria from the foam of ocean," rocked in the embrace of his restless tides and forever faithful to the heavings of his tumultous bosom.

Barren this island may at first appear, but the great ocean currents flowing from the tropics clothe it with flowers and evergreens and give it a language of perpetual spring, and as old Neptune's train goes careering by upon the azure waves of the boisterous Atlantic, it awakes the sleeping flowers from their sweet dreams of Eden; they whisper to their sister flowers and the dewy air becomes more redolent with fragrance.

You enter the profession, gentlemen, in the "golden age of medicine, when it is daily and hourly, as if with an Ariadnean thread, penetrating the deep labyrinths of mysterious science, and deducing therefrom practical truths, which are to be of incalculable benefit to suffering humanity.

The regular school of medicine is now working harder and doing more toward the development of scientific truths pertaining to the health and longevity of man, than any body of scientific men in existence.

I take the high ground that we belong to the grandest and noblest profession the world ever saw; are entitled to and should demand a proper recognition of our status as a body.

of scientific observers second to none. I appeal to history and the record to sustain me in the position assumed. We have a history all our own, standing out singly and alone, unexcelled and unapproachable.

Look along the medical line from Hippocrates to the present, with its mouldering monuments of fallen greatness, their epitaphs of immortal glory, written in letters of living light across the darkest pages of humanity's history, and feel proud of a profession grown hoary in the faithful discharge of duty, when true moral courage and unflinching faith of the highest type were essential to withstand the pressure.

The old school of medicine, as it is called by some, but the regular, rational, progressive, and only scientific school, as it properly is, has single-handed and alone presented everything that is really useful in medicine or surgery, a free offering upon the altar of suffering humanity. It has no secret nostrums, no patented remedies or instruments, "no pent up Utica" contracts its knowledge, but in trumpet tones it proclaims its discoveries and inventions, and the whole scientific world has the benefit of them. No false dogmas control its powers or direct its faith, but in the spirit of true scholarship it utilizes the component elements of worlds.

Prometheus-like, it filches the fire from heaven, chains the nimble-footed lightnings to its electric batteries and sends it dancing along the sluggish human nerves. It draws its healing balms from the native forest, fields and blooming gardens of the earth, cultured by the fair hands of Nature, until as redolent with fragrance as an angel's fresh-culled crown, and as variegated in beauty as if a world of rainbows had burst and scattered their fragments there. With its scientific rod it strikes the rock-ribbed mountain, and from the deep wrinkles on their thunder-riven brows the Goddess of Nature, in response to the appeals from her suffering children, causes to flow rich streams of medicinal ores and health-giving mineral waters.

It reins the myriads of mental workers the wide world over to her flaming car of science, and with dauntless courage and unfaltering faith drives amid the moke and carnage of battle to meet death in the fiery flash of the cannon's mouth, or in

the silent, though not less fatal, tread of the relentless pestilence, "still as the breeze but dreadful as the storm," as he reaps his mortal harvest for immortality.

Ah! gentlemen, in spite of all this, we have been at times most unjustly accused of infidelity; but you study your noble profession in the full length, depth and breadth of its entire comprehensiveness and you will find it intimately intertwined with the very vital fibers of all true religion, as the foundation of all true Christian religion has for its basis the brotherhood of man. He who would serve the Lord must first serve his fellow-man. What a man does for others, not what they do for him, gains him immortality.

Then give yon silent city of the dead, Elmwood, a tongue, and from out her billowed earth sadly and mournfully would she call the roll of our martyred heroes-B. W. Avent, John H. Erskine, and that long list of chivalric volunteers who responded with such alacrity to the cry for help that went up from a fever-stricken city, into whose pestilential lap was thrown, with a nation's lavish hand, untold thousands, and into whose afflicted bosom was poured a nation's profoundest sympathies.

Within view of that commercial metropolis, after the lapse of fourteen eventful years, and within the sound of its busy hum of life, now preparing a gala day to celebrate the triumph of engineering skill by the linking of two sister States with hooks of steel and the bridging of one of the grandest commercial arteries of the nation, our martyrs lie sleeping with no monument to mark the spot, save that which marks the ingratitude of a thankless people whom they died to save.

But, thank God, they sleep the sleep of the immortal. Such spirits were not born to die unhonored, and at eventide, when the plaintive zephyr sings through the brawny and uplifted arms of the sentinel oaks its lullaby to the declining day, they echo the whispers of Deity from on high, saying, "I will repay," and their sainted names will be written first upon the great, white scroll of the recording angel as those who loved and died for their fellow-men.