igently in
the lecture-room. But it is not the same as if he had never learned it.
A man must get a thing before he can forget it. There is a great world
of ideas we cannot voluntarily recall,--they are outside the limits of
the will. But they sway our conscious thought as the unseen planets
influence the movements of those within the sphere of vision. No man
knows how much he knows,--how many ideas he has,--any more than he knows
how many blood-globules roll in his veins. Sometimes accident brings
back here and there one, but the mind is full of irrevocable remembrances
and unthinkable thoughts, which take a part in all its judgments as
indestructible forces. Some of you must feel your scientific
deficiencies painfully after your best efforts. But every one can
acquire what is most essential. A man of very moderate ability may be a
good physician, if he devotes himself faithfully to the work. More than
this, a positively dull man, in the ordinary acceptation of the term,
sometimes makes a safer practitioner than one who has, we will say, five
per cent. more brains than his average neighbor, but who thinks it is
fifty per cent. more. Skulls belonging to this last variety of the human
race are more common, I may remark, than specimens like the Neanderthal
cranium, a cast of which you will find on the table in the Museum.

Whether the average talent be high or low, the Colleges of the land must
make the best commodity they can out of such material as the country and
the cities furnish them. The community must have Doctors as it must have
bread. It uses up its Doctors just as it wears out its shoes, and
requires new ones. All the bread need not be French rolls, all the shoes
need not be patent leather ones; but the bread must be something that can
be eaten, and the shoes must be something that can be worn. Life must
somehow find food for the two forces that rub everything to pieces, or
burn it to ashes,--friction and oxygen. Doctors are oxydable products,
and the schools must keep furnishing new ones as the old ones turn into
oxyds; some of first-rate quality that burn with a great light, some of a
lower grade of brilliancy, some honestly, unmistakably, by the grace of
God, of moderate gifts, or in simpler phrase, dull.

The public will give every honest and reasonably competent worker in the
healing art a hearty welcome. It is on the whole very loyal to the
Medical Profession. Three successive years have borne witness to