GENTLEMEN,—Medicine, using that term in its broadest !B3ense as including all that relates to the maintenance or restoration of health, owes much of the attraction which it oxerciaes on those who study and practise it to its everdncreasing expansiveness. Looking back through the years that have passed since, as a student, I sat on the benches of 'this college I cannot but be struck with the marvellousness of the change which it has undergone during that period ; and if we were endowed with the

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... ower of accurate anticipation as we are with that of retrospection, we should no doubt be as much astonished at the development which it will 'undergo during the coming thirty or forty years of its history as we now are with that which it has undergone during those just ending. Antiseptic surgery, with all its vast and splendid consequences to humanity; preventive medicine as a distinct and most fruitful branch of our profession ; the proved relation of micro-organisms to some of the most Hirulent forms of infectious or contagious disease, with the subsequent discovery of methods of destroying these organisms without destroying the person in whose body they were multiplying, or of so modifying the character of <the person's blood as to render him immune to their attacks ; the determination of the influence of the internal secretions of some of the glands upon metabolic processes and the application of this fact to practice ; the ue of serum tests ;and serum therapy in the early recognition and cure of disease ; the proved antagonism between the poison of acute rheumatism and salicin and its allies ; these and many other 'achievements must rise instantly before the mind of every one of us. Yet if all this had been foretold a century ago the prophet who proclaimed it would have been treated in the spirit in which true prophets always have been treated. He would siot have been burned, because, happily, burning as a method of teaching trmth or repressing error had long before gone out of fashion ; but all that contemptuous sneers or cold indifference or open antagonism could do to break his heart or drown his voice would have been done, notwithstanding the supposed general enlightenment that characterised that, as it is thought to characterise this, age. In justification of this statement I will read to you a few words from a very remarkable prophecy, published just 103 years ago, which 'has earned for its distinguished author, even at the hands of biographers generally favourable to him, such appellations as dreamer," "visionary," benevolent enthusiast," "well-meaning mystic," &c., but never once that of a 'far-seeing, enlightened, philosophic seer. Condorcet-for he was the prophet-was being hunted to his death by the merciless agents of the Convention, yet undismayed by the terrors in the midst of which he was living he employed the last few weeks of his life, not in bemoaning his fate or vainly quarrelling with his times, but in looking forward with the 'clear and undimmed vision of a scientific prophet to a happier era which was even then he believed showing signs of dawning for humanity, and in his "Lsquisee d'une tableau historique des progrea de 1'esprit humain," wrote down what he saw. I will quote one passage, which runs as follows: " The organic perfectibility or deterioration of the 'classes of the vegetable or species of the animal kingdom may be regarded as one of the general laws of nature. This 'law extends itself to the human race ; and it cannot be doubted that the progress of the sanative art ; that the use cof more wholesome food, and more comfortable habitations ; that a mode of life which shall develop the physical powers ir_ rv?-f2r';P I by exercise, without at the same time impairing them by excess ; in fine, that the destruction of the two most active causes of deterioration, penury and wretchedness on the one hand, and enormous wealth on the other, must necessarily tend to prolong the common duration of man's existence, and secure him a more constant health and a more robust constitution. It is manifest that the improvement of the practice of medicine, become more efficacious in consequence of the progress of reason and the social order, must in the end put a period to transmissible or contagious disorders, as well as to those general maladies resulting from climate, aliments, and the nature of certain occupations. Nor would it be difficult to prove that this hope might be extended to almost every other malady of which it is probable we shall hereafter discover the most remote causes. Would it even be absurd to suppose this quality of meliuration in the human species as susceptible of an indefinite advancement ; to suppose that a. period must one day arrive when death will be nothing more than the effect either of extraordinary accidents, or of the slow and gradual decay of the vital powers ; and that the duration of the middle space, of the interval between the birth of man and this decay, will itself have no assignable limit? 7 Certainly, man will not become immortal ; but may not the distance between the moment in which he draws hisfirst breath and the common term when, in the course of nature, without malady, without accident, he finds it impossible any longer to exist, be necessarily protracted ? " " That we are far, very far, yet from the realisation of this magnificent vision of future happiness of man upon earth is, alas, too true, yet it is a significant fact that every step taken since it was proclaimed has been distinctly in the direction of its fulfilment and has been taken, moreover, under the direct inspiration and guidance of our professions and we have but to remember that only a very few years before it was uttered Louis XV. of France had died of malignant small-pox, as annually died many thousands of his and our fellow countrymen ; that Jenner's great discovery had not been proclaimed and adopted ; that Voltaire is said to have characterised medical men, from whom Condorcet hoped so much, as those who put medicines of' which they knew little into stomachs cf which they knew less ; and that not one of those great recently discovered scientific truths, the application of which has been so fruitful of good to mankind, had been so much as thought of, in order to be struck with the boldness of the prevision and encouraged to hope for, and aid in, its progressive fulfilment. Look but for a moment at a small part of what has been achieved in this country under one only of the heads enumerated by him-viz., the sanative art-since in 1844 the " Health of Towns Commission clear]y revealed the extent to which preventable diseases prevailed and the means best calculated to check them, and especially since the Public Health Acts of 1872 and 1875 mapped out the entire kingdom into workable subdivisions and placed each under the supervision of an educated medical man ; think of what is implied by a fall in the death-rate, which then for the first time in our national histcry began, from 22'5 to 18 7 per 1000; think of cholera havirg been as effectually banished from our chores as plague has been ; think of the fact that typhus fever, which not long ago caused many thousands of deaths annually, and an outbreak of which when I was a student of this hospital almost decimated some of its wards, being now so little known that probably not one out of ten young medical men has ever had an opportunity of seeing a case; think how Adulteration Acts have insured to the poor that wholesome food and clothing which unprincipled manufacturers in their greed of gain would have denied them; how insanitary houses are everywhere being condemned and destroyed and healthy habitations for the poor replacing them ; how injurious trades and manufactures are being supervised and modified in such a way as to promote and not to destroy the health of those employed in them ; how open spaces are provided for healthy and rational exercise; how at last something of the care and consideration lorg given to the production and maintenance of a perfect machinery is being legally enforced for preserving the lives and health of those who work it; and how that in every large city in this and every other civilised country great numbers of earnest, thoughtful, scientific members of our profession are devoting time, energy, and talent to an investigation of those remote causes of disease and the means of destrcying them to which Condorcet referred, and you will be filled with hope and encouragement and with a determination that the legitimate influence which medical opinion and p