rolls, all the shoes
need not be patent leather ones; but the bread must be something that
can be eaten, and the shoes must be something that can be worn. Life
must somehow find food for the two forces that rub everything to
pieces, or burn it to ashes,--friction and oxygen. Doctors are oxydable
products, and the schools must keep furnishing new ones as the old
ones turn into oxyds; some of first-rate quality that burn with a great
light, some of a lower grade of brilliancy, some honestly, unmistakably,
by the grace of God, of moderate gifts, or in simpler phrase, dull.

The public will give every honest and reasonably competent worker in
the healing art a hearty welcome. It is on the whole very loyal to the
Medical Profession. Three successive years have borne witness to the
feeling with which this Institution, representing it in its educational
aspect, is regarded by those who are themselves most honored and
esteemed. The great Master of Natural Science bade the last year's class
farewell in our behalf, in those accents which delight every audience.
The Head of our ancient University honored us in the same way in the
preceding season. And how can we forget that other occasion when the
Chief Magistrate of the Commonwealth, that noble citizen whom we have
just lost, large-souled, sweet-natured, always ready for every kind
office, came among us at our bidding, and talked to us of our duties in
words as full of wisdom as his heart was of goodness?

You have not much to fear, I think, from the fancy practitioners. The
vulgar quackeries drop off, atrophied, one after another. Homoeopathy
has long been encysted, and is carried on the body medical as quietly as
an old wen. Every year gives you a more reasoning and reasonable people
to deal with. See how it is in Literature. The dynasty of British
dogmatists, after lasting a hundred years and more, is on its last legs.
Thomas Carlyle, third in the line of descent, finds an audience very
different from those which listened to the silver speech of Samuel
Taylor Coleridge and the sonorous phrases of Samuel Johnson. We
read him, we smile at his clotted English, his "swarmery" and other
picturesque expressions, but we lay down his tirade as we do one of Dr.
Cumming's interpretations of prophecy, which tells us that the world is
coming to an end next week or next month, if the weather permits,--not
otherwise,--feeling very sure that the weather will be unfavorable.

It is the same