enormous repetition, representation, and illustration in all possible
forms. Now and then you will have a young man on your benches like the
late Waldo Burnett,--not very often, if you lecture half a century. You
cannot pretend to lecture chiefly for men like that,--a Mississippi raft
might as well take an ocean-steamer in tow. To meet his wants you would
have to leave the rest of your class behind and that you must not do.
President Allen of Jefferson College says that his instruction has
been successful in proportion as it has been elementary. It may be a
humiliating statement, but it is one which I have found true in my own
experience.

To the student I would say, that however plain and simple may be our
teaching, he must expect to forget much which he follows intelligently
in the lecture-room. But it is not the same as if he had never learned
it. A man must get a thing before he can forget it. There is a great
world of ideas we cannot voluntarily recall,--they are outside the
limits of the will. But they sway our conscious thought as the unseen
planets influence the movements of those within the sphere of vision. No
man knows how much he knows,--how many ideas he has,--any more than
he knows how many blood-globules roll in his veins. Sometimes accident
brings back here and there one, but the mind is full of irrevocable
remembrances and unthinkable thoughts, which take a part in all
its judgments as indestructible forces. Some of you must feel your
scientific deficiencies painfully after your best efforts. But every one
can acquire what is most essential. A man of very moderate ability may
be a good physician, if he devotes himself faithfully to the work. More
than this, a positively dull man, in the ordinary acceptation of the
term, sometimes makes a safer practitioner than one who has, we will
say, five per cent. more brains than his average neighbor, but who
thinks it is fifty per cent. more. Skulls belonging to this last variety
of the human race are more common, I may remark, than specimens like the
Neanderthal cranium, a cast of which you will find on the table in the
Museum.

Whether the average talent be high or low, the Colleges of the land must
make the best commodity they can out of such material as the country and
the cities furnish them. The community must have Doctors as it must
have bread. It uses up its Doctors just as it wears out its shoes, and
requires new ones. All the bread need not be French