e moments to give you some
hints which may help you to realize your hopes and expectations. Such is
the outline of the familiar talk I shall offer you.

Your acquaintance with some of the accessory branches is probably greater
now than it will be in a year from now,--much greater than it will by ten
years from now. The progress of knowledge, it may be feared, or hoped,
will have outrun the text-books in which you studied these branches.
Chemistry, for instance, is very apt to spoil on one's hands. "Nous
avons change tout cela" might serve as the standing motto of many of our
manuals. Science is a great traveller, and wears her shoes out pretty
fast, as might be expected.

You are now fresh from the lecture-room and the laboratory. You can pass
an examination in anatomy, physiology, chemistry, materia medica, which
the men in large practice all around you would find a more potent
sudorific than any in the Pharmacopceia. These masters of the art of
healing were once as ready with their answers as you are now, but they
have got rid of a great deal of the less immediately practical part of
their acquisitions, and you must undergo the same depleting process.
Hard work will train it off, as sharp exercise trains off the fat of a
prize-fighter.

Yet, pause a moment before you infer that your teachers must have been in
fault when they furnished you with mental stores not directly convertible
to practical purposes, and likely in a few years to lose their place in
your memory. All systematic knowledge involves much that is not
practical, yet it is the only kind of knowledge which satisfies the mind,
and systematic study proves, in the long-run, the easiest way of
acquiring and retaining facts which are practical. There are many things
which we can afford to forget, which yet it was well to learn. Your
mental condition is not the same as if you had never known what you now
try in vain to recall. There is a perpetual metempsychosis of thought,
and the knowledge of to-day finds a soil in the forgotten facts of
yesterday. You cannot see anything in the new season of the guano you
placed last year about the roots of your climbing plants, but it is
blushing and breathing fragrance in your trellised roses; it has scaled
your porch in the bee-haunted honey-suckle; it has found its way where
the ivy is green; it is gone where the woodbine expands its luxuriant
foliage.

Your diploma seems very broad to-day with your list of accomplish