little more of him than that he was a
great drawer of blood and hewer of members. I remember his ordering a
wholesale bleeding of his patients, right and left, whatever might be
the matter with them, one morning when a phlebotomizing fit was on
him. I recollect his regretting the splendid guardsmen of the old
Empire,--for what? because they had such magnificent thighs to amputate.
I got along about as far as that with him, when I ceased to be a
follower of M. Lisfranc.

The name of Velpeau must have reached many of you, for he died in 1867,
and his many works made his name widely known. Coming to Paris in wooden
shoes, starving, almost, at first, he raised himself to great eminence
as a surgeon and as an author, and at last obtained the Professorship
to which his talents and learning entitled him. His example may be an
encouragement to some of my younger hearers who are born, not with the
silver spoon in their mouths, but with the two-tined iron fork in their
hands. It is a poor thing to take up their milk porridge with in
their young days, but in after years it will often transfix the solid
dumplings that roll out of the silver spoon. So Velpeau found it. He
had not what is called genius, he was far from prepossessing in aspect,
looking as if he might have wielded the sledge-hammer (as I think he
had done in early life) rather than the lancet, but he had industry,
determination, intelligence, character, and he made his way to
distinction and prosperity, as some of you sitting on these benches and
wondering anxiously what is to become of you in the struggle for life
will have done before the twentieth century has got halfway through its
first quarter. A good sound head over a pair of wooden shoes is a great
deal better than a wooden head belonging to an owner who cases his feet
in calf-skin, but a good brain is not enough without a stout heart to
fill the four great conduits which carry at once fuel and fire to that
mightiest of engines.

How many of you who are before me are familiarly acquainted with the
name of Broussais, or even with that of Andral? Both were lecturing at
the Ecole de Medicine, and I often heard them. Broussais was in those
days like an old volcano, which has pretty nearly used up its fire and
brimstone, but is still boiling and bubbling in its interior, and now
and then sends up a spirt of lava and a volley of pebbles. His theories
of gastro-enteritis, of irritation and inflammation as the cause o