s.
The days of your education, as pupils of trained instructors, are over.
Your first harvest is all garnered. Henceforth you are to be sowers as
well as reapers, and your field is the world. How does your knowledge
stand to-day? What have you gained as a permanent possession? What
must you expect to forget? What remains for you yet to learn? These are
questions which it may interest you to consider.

There is another question which must force itself on the thoughts
of many among you: "How am I to obtain patients and to keep their
confidence?" You have chosen a laborious calling, and made many
sacrifices to fit yourselves for its successful pursuit. You wish to be
employed that you may be useful, and that you may receive the reward of
your industry. I would take advantage of these most receptive moments
to give you some hints which may help you to realize your hopes and
expectations. Such is the outline of the familiar talk I shall offer
you.

Your acquaintance with some of the accessory branches is probably
greater now than it will be in a year from now,--much greater than it
will by ten years from now. The progress of knowledge, it may be feared,
or hoped, will have outrun the text-books in which you studied these
branches. Chemistry, for instance, is very apt to spoil on one's hands.
"Nous avons change tout cela" might serve as the standing motto of many
of our manuals. Science is a great traveller, and wears her shoes out
pretty fast, as might be expected.

You are now fresh from the lecture-room and the laboratory. You can pass
an examination in anatomy, physiology, chemistry, materia medica,
which the men in large practice all around you would find a more potent
sudorific than any in the Pharmacopceia. These masters of the art of
healing were once as ready with their answers as you are now, but they
have got rid of a great deal of the less immediately practical part of
their acquisitions, and you must undergo the same depleting process.
Hard work will train it off, as sharp exercise trains off the fat of a
prize-fighter.

Yet, pause a moment before you infer that your teachers must have
been in fault when they furnished you with mental stores not directly
convertible to practical purposes, and likely in a few years to lose
their place in your memory. All systematic knowledge involves much that
is not practical, yet it is the only kind of knowledge which satisfies
the mind, and systematic study proves, in the