f the
Church, opened his mind to the facts which contradicted the dogmas of the
Faculty.

Harvey himself was but the posthumous child of the great Elizabethan
period. Bacon was at once his teacher and his patient. The founder of
the new inductive philosophy had only been dead two years when the
treatise on the Circulation, the first-fruit of the Restoration of
Science, was given to the world.

And is it to be looked at as a mere accidental coincidence, that while
Napoleon was modernizing the political world, Bichat was revolutionizing
the science of life and the art that is based upon it; that while the
young general was scaling the Alps, the young surgeon was climbing the
steeper summits of unexplored nature; that the same year read the
announcement of those admirable "Researches on Life and Death," and the
bulletins of the battle of Marengo?

If we come to our own country, who can fail to recognize that Benjamin
Rush, the most conspicuous of American physicians, was the intellectual
offspring of the movement which produced the Revolution? "The same hand,"
says one of his biographers, "which subscribed the declaration of the
political independence of these States, accomplished their emancipation
from medical systems formed in foreign countries, and wholly unsuitable
to the state of diseases in America."

Following this general course of remark, I propose to indicate in a few
words the direction of the main intellectual current of the time, and to
point out more particularly some of the eddies which tend to keep the
science and art of medicine from moving with it, or even to carry them
backwards.

The two dominant words of our time are law and average, both pointing to
the uniformity of the order of being in which we live. Statistics have
tabulated everything,--population, growth, wealth, crime, disease. We
have shaded maps showing the geographical distribution of larceny and
suicide. Analysis and classification have been at work upon all tangible
and visible objects. The Positive Philosophy of Comte has only given
expression to the observing and computing mind of the nineteenth century.

In the mean time, the great stronghold of intellectual conservatism,
traditional belief, has been assailed by facts which would have been
indicted as blasphemy but a few generations ago. Those new tables of the
law, placed in the hands of the geologist by the same living God who
spoke from Sinai to the Israelites of old, have re