e Faculty, I count twelve upon the Catalogue before me, and I find the
whole number engaged in the work of instruction in the Medical School
amounts to no less than fifty.

Since I began teaching in this school, the aspect of many branches of
science has undergone a very remarkable transformation. Chemistry and
Physiology are no longer what they were, as taught by the instructors
of that time. We are looking forward to the synthesis of new organic
compounds; our artificial madder is already in the market, and the
indigo-raisers are now fearing that their crop will be supplanted by the
manufactured article. In the living body we talk of fuel supplied and
work done, in movement, in heat, just as if we were dealing with a
machine of our own contrivance.

A physiological laboratory of to-day is equipped with instruments of
research of such ingenious contrivance, such elaborate construction,
that one might suppose himself in a workshop where some exquisite fabric
was to be wrought, such as Queens love to wear, and Kings do not always
love to pay for. They are, indeed, weaving a charmed web, for these are
the looms from which comes the knowledge that clothes the nakedness of
the intellect. Here are the mills that grind food for its hunger, and
"is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment?"

But while many of the sciences have so changed that the teachers of the
past would hardly know them, it has not been so with the branch I teach,
or, rather, with that division of it which is chiefly taught in this
amphitheatre. General anatomy, or histology, on the other hand, is
almost all new; it has grown up, mainly, since I began my medical
studies. I never saw a compound microscope during my years of study in
Paris. Individuals had begun to use the instrument, but I never heard
it alluded to by either Professors or students. In descriptive anatomy I
have found little to unlearn, and not a great deal that was both new and
important to learn. Trifling additions are made from year to year, not
to be despised and not to be overvalued. Some of the older anatomical
works are still admirable, some of the newer ones very much the
contrary. I have had recent anatomical plates brought me for inspection,
and I have actually button-holed the book-agent, a being commonly as
hard to get rid of as the tar-baby in the negro legend, that I might put
him to shame with the imperial illustrations of the bones and muscles
in the great foli