tion, indifference, selfishness,
faintheartedness, and that great property of mind as well as
matter,--inertia. We are not met in a cathedral, except so far as every
building whose walls are lined with the products of useful and ennobling
thought is a temple of the Almighty, whose inspiration has given us
understanding. But we have gathered within walls which bear testimony to
the self-sacrificing, persevering efforts of a few young men, to whom
we owe the origin and development of all that excites our admiration in
this completed enterprise; and I might consider my task as finished if I
contented myself with borrowing the last word of the architect's epitaph
and only saying, Look around you!

The reports of the librarian have told or will tell you, in some detail,
what has been accomplished since the 21st of December, 1874, when six
gentlemen met at the house of Dr. Henry Ingersoll Bowditch to discuss
different projects for a medical library. In less than four years from
that time, by the liberality of associations and of individuals, this
collection of nearly ten thousand volumes, of five thousand pamphlets,
and of one hundred and twenty-five journals, regularly received,--all
worthily sheltered beneath this lofty roof,--has come into being under
our eyes. It has sprung up, as it were; in the night like a mushroom; it
stands before us in full daylight as lusty as an oak, and promising to
grow and flourish in the perennial freshness of an evergreen.

To whom does our profession owe this already large collection of books,
exceeded in numbers only by four or five of the most extensive medical
libraries in the country, and lodged in a building so well adapted to
its present needs? We will not point out individually all those younger
members of the profession who have accomplished what their fathers and
elder brethren had attempted and partially achieved. We need not write
their names on these walls, after the fashion of those civic dignitaries
who immortalize themselves on tablets of marble and gates of iron. But
their contemporaries know them well, and their descendants will not
forget them,--the men who first met together, the men who have given
their time and their money, the faithful workers, worthy associates of
the strenuous agitator who gave no sleep to his eyes, no slumber to
his eyelids, until he had gained his ends; the untiring, imperturbable,
tenacious, irrepressible, all-subduing agitator who neither rested