t of December, 1874, when six
gentlemen met at the house of Dr. Henry Ingersoll Bowditch to discuss
different projects for a medical library. In less than four years from
that time, by the liberality of associations and of individuals, this
collection of nearly ten thousand volumes, of five thousand pamphlets,
and of one hundred and twenty-five journals, regularly received,--all
worthily sheltered beneath this lofty roof,--has come into being under
our eyes. It has sprung up, as it were; in the night like a mushroom; it
stands before us in full daylight as lusty as an oak, and promising to
grow and flourish in the perennial freshness of an evergreen.

To whom does our profession owe this already large collection of books,
exceeded in numbers only by four or five of the most extensive medical
libraries in the country, and lodged in a building so well adapted to its
present needs? We will not point out individually all those younger
members of the profession who have accomplished what their fathers and
elder brethren had attempted and partially achieved. We need not write
their names on these walls, after the fashion of those civic dignitaries
who immortalize themselves on tablets of marble and gates of iron. But
their contemporaries know them well, and their descendants will not
forget them,--the men who first met together, the men who have given
their time and their money, the faithful workers, worthy associates of
the strenuous agitator who gave no sleep to his eyes, no slumber to his
eyelids, until he had gained his ends; the untiring, imperturbable,
tenacious, irrepressible, all-subduing agitator who neither rested nor
let others rest until the success of the project was assured. If,
against his injunctions, I name Dr. James Read Chadwick, it is only my
revenge for his having kept me awake so often and so long while he was
urging on the undertaking in which he has been preeminently active and
triumphantly successful.

We must not forget the various medical libraries which preceded this:
that of an earlier period, when Boston contained about seventy regular
practitioners, the collection afterwards transferred to the Boston
Athenaeum; the two collections belonging to the University; the Treadwell
Library at the Massachusetts General Hospital; the collections of the two
societies, that for Medical Improvement and that for Medical Observation;
and more especially the ten thousand volumes relating to medicine
belonging t