an
encouragement to some of my younger hearers who are born, not with the
silver spoon in their mouths, but with the two-tined iron fork in their
hands. It is a poor thing to take up their milk porridge with in their
young days, but in after years it will often transfix the solid dumplings
that roll out of the silver spoon. So Velpeau found it. He had not what
is called genius, he was far from prepossessing in aspect, looking as if
he might have wielded the sledge-hammer (as I think he had done in early
life) rather than the lancet, but he had industry, determination,
intelligence, character, and he made his way to distinction and
prosperity, as some of you sitting on these benches and wondering
anxiously what is to become of you in the struggle for life will have
done before the twentieth century has got halfway through its first
quarter. A good sound head over a pair of wooden shoes is a great deal
better than a wooden head belonging to an owner who cases his feet in
calf-skin, but a good brain is not enough without a stout heart to fill
the four great conduits which carry at once fuel and fire to that
mightiest of engines.

How many of you who are before me are familiarly acquainted with the name
of Broussais, or even with that of Andral? Both were lecturing at the
Ecole de Medicine, and I often heard them. Broussais was in those days
like an old volcano, which has pretty nearly used up its fire and
brimstone, but is still boiling and bubbling in its interior, and now and
then sends up a spirt of lava and a volley of pebbles. His theories of
gastro-enteritis, of irritation and inflammation as the cause of disease,
and the practice which sprang from them, ran over the fields of medicine
for a time like flame over the grass of the prairies. The way in which
that knotty-featured, savage old man would bring out the word
irritation--with rattling and rolling reduplication of the resonant
letter r--might have taught a lesson in articulation to Salvini. But
Broussais's theory was languishing and well-nigh become obsolete, and
this, no doubt, added vehemence to his defence of his cherished dogmas.

Old theories, and old men who cling to them, must take themselves out of
the way as the new generation with its fresh thoughts and altered habits
of mind comes forward to take the place of that which is dying out. This
was a truth which the fiery old theorist found it very hard to learn, and
harder to bear, as it was forced upon