long-run, the easiest way
of acquiring and retaining facts which are practical. There are many
things which we can afford to forget, which yet it was well to learn.
Your mental condition is not the same as if you had never known what
you now try in vain to recall. There is a perpetual metempsychosis of
thought, and the knowledge of to-day finds a soil in the forgotten facts
of yesterday. You cannot see anything in the new season of the guano
you placed last year about the roots of your climbing plants, but it is
blushing and breathing fragrance in your trellised roses; it has scaled
your porch in the bee-haunted honey-suckle; it has found its way where
the ivy is green; it is gone where the woodbine expands its luxuriant
foliage.

Your diploma seems very broad to-day with your list of accomplishments,
but it begins to shrink from this hour like the Peau de Chagrin of
Balzac's story. Do not worry about it, for all the while there will be
making out for you an ampler and fairer parchment, signed by old Father
Time himself as President of that great University in which experience
is the one perpetual and all-sufficient professor.

Your present plethora of acquirements will soon cure itself. Knowledge
that is not wanted dies out like the eyes of the fishes of the Mammoth
Cave. When you come to handle life and death as your daily business,
your memory will of itself bid good-by to such inmates as the
well-known foramina of the sphenoid bone and the familiar oxides of
methyl-ethylamyl-phenyl-ammonium. Be thankful that you have once known
them, and remember that even the learned ignorance of a nomenclature
is something to have mastered, and may furnish pegs to hang facts
upon which would otherwise have strewed the floor of memory in loose
disorder.

But your education has, after all, been very largely practical. You have
studied medicine and surgery, not chiefly in books, but at the bedside
and in the operating amphitheatre. It is the special advantage of
large cities that they afford the opportunity of seeing a great deal of
disease in a short space of time, and of seeing many cases of the same
kind of disease brought together. Let us not be unjust to the claims of
the schools remote from the larger centres of population. Who among us
has taught better than Nathan Smith, better than Elisha Bartlett? who
teaches better than some of our living contemporaries who divide their
time between city and country schools? I am afraid