er;
Dr. James Jackson loved to tell of Mr. Cline and to talk of Mr. John
Hunter; Dr. Reynolds would give you his recollections of Sir Astley
Cooper and Mr. Abernethy; I have named the famous Frenchmen of my
student days; Leyden, Edinburgh, London, Paris, were each in turn the
Mecca of medical students, just as at the present day Vienna and Berlin
are the centres where our young men crowd for instruction. These also
must sooner or later yield their precedence and pass the torch they
hold to other hands. Where shall it next flame at the head of the long
procession? Shall it find its old place on the shores of the Gulf of
Salerno, or shall it mingle its rays with the northern aurora up among
the fiords of Norway,--or shall it be borne across the Atlantic and
reach the banks of the Charles, where Agassiz and Wyman have taught,
where Hagen still teaches, glowing like his own Lampyris splendidula,
with enthusiasm, where the first of American botanists and the ablest
of American surgeons are still counted in the roll of honor of our great
University?

Let me add a few words which shall not be other than cheerful, as I bid
farewell to this edifice which I have known so long. I am grateful to
the roof which has sheltered me, to the floors which have sustained me,
though I have thought it safest always to abstain from anything like
eloquence, lest a burst of too emphatic applause might land my class
and myself in the cellar of the collapsing structure, and bury us in the
fate of Korah, Dathan, and Abiram. I have helped to wear these stairs
into hollows,--stairs which I trod when they were smooth and level,
fresh from the plane. There are just thirty-two of them, as there were
five and thirty years ago, but they are steeper and harder to climb, it
seems to me, than they were then. I remember that in the early youth of
this building, the late Dr. John K. Mitchell, father of our famous Dr.
Weir Mitchell, said to me as we came out of the Demonstrator's room,
that some day or other a whole class would go heels over head down this
graded precipice, like the herd told of in Scripture story. This has
never happened as yet; I trust it never will. I have never been proud
of the apartment beneath the seats, in which my preparations for lecture
were made. But I chose it because I could have it to myself, and I
resign it, with a wish that it were more worthy of regret, into the
hands of my successor, with my parting benediction. Within its tw