science but the piecemeal revelation,--uncovering,--of the plan
of creation, by the agency of those chosen prophets of nature whom God
has illuminated from the central light of truth for that single purpose?

The studies which we have glanced at are preliminary in your
education to the practical arts which make use of them,--the arts of
healing,--surgery and medicine. The more you examine the structure of
the organs and the laws of life, the more you will find how resolutely
each of the cell-republics which make up the E pluribus unum of the body
maintains its independence. Guard it, feed it, air it, warm it, exercise
or rest it properly, and the working elements will do their best to keep
well or to get well. What do we do with ailing vegetables? Dr. Warren,
my honored predecessor in this chair, bought a country-place, including
half of an old orchard. A few years afterwards I saw the trees on his
side of the fence looking in good health, while those on the other side
were scraggy and miserable. How do you suppose this change was brought
about? By watering them with Fowler's solution? By digging in calomel
freely about their roots? Not at all; but by loosening the soil
round them, and supplying them with the right kind of food in fitting
quantities.

Now a man is not a plant, or, at least, he is a very curious one, for
he carries his soil in his stomach, which is a kind--of portable
flower-pot, and he grows round it, instead of out of it. He has,
besides, a singularly complex nutritive apparatus and a nervous system.
But recollect the doctrine already enunciated in the language of
Virchow, that an animal, like a tree, is a sum of vital unities, of
which the cell is the ultimate element. Every healthy cell, whether in
a vegetable or an animal, necessarily performs its function properly
so long as it is supplied with its proper materials and stimuli. A cell
may, it is true, be congenitally defective, in which case disease is,
so to speak, its normal state. But if originally sound and subsequently
diseased, there has certainly been some excess, deficiency, or wrong
quality in the materials or stimuli applied to it. You remove this
injurious influence and substitute a normal one; remove the baked
coal-ashes, for instance, from the roots of a tree, and replace them
with loam; take away the salt meat from the patient's table, and replace
it with fresh meat and vegetables, and the cells of the tree or the man
return to their