o our noble public city library,--too many blossoms on the
tree of knowledge, perhaps, for the best fruit to ripen. But the
Massachusetts Medical Society now numbers nearly four hundred members in
the city of Boston. The time had arrived for a new and larger movement.
There was needed a place to which every respectable member of the medical
profession could obtain easy access; where, under one roof, all might
find the special information they were seeking; where the latest medical
intelligence should be spread out daily as the shipping news is posted on
the bulletins of the exchange; where men engaged in a common pursuit
could meet, surrounded by the mute oracles of science and art; where the
whole atmosphere should be as full of professional knowledge as the
apothecary's shop is of the odor of his medicaments. This was what the
old men longed for,--the prophets and kings of the profession, who

"Desired it long,
But died without the sight."

This is what the young men and those who worked under their guidance
undertook to give us. And now such a library, such a reading-room, such
an exchange, such an intellectual and social meeting place, we be hold a
fact, plain before us. The medical profession of our city, and, let us
add, of all those neighboring places which it can reach with its iron
arms, is united as never before by the commune vinculum, the common bond
of a large, enduring, ennobling, unselfish interest. It breathes a new
air of awakened intelligence. It marches abreast of the other learned
professions, which have long had their extensive and valuable centralized
libraries; abreast of them, but not promising to be content with that
position. What glorifies a town like a cathedral? What dignifies a
province like a university? What illuminates a country like its
scholarship, and what is the nest that hatches scholars but a library?

The physician, some may say, is a practical man and has little use for
all this book-learning. Every student has heard Sydenham's reply to Sir
Richard Blackmore's question as to what books he should read,--meaning
medical books. "Read Don Quixote," was his famous answer. But Sydenham
himself made medical books and may be presumed to have thought those at
least worth reading. Descartes was asked where was his library, and in
reply held up the dissected body of an animal. But Descartes made books,
great books, and a great many of them. A physician of common sense
without e