the highest powers of our microscopes. The physicians are, as it were, the hands of man-of all creatures the most full of needs, and by his needs crowned ruler of them all-his hands, stretched forth to gather, from every quarter, aid for his infirmities, resources for his weakness. And every science is a hand stretched forth in answer.

But that is the worst of it. It is (as a great American, a physician also, says) like shaking hands with Briareus. To invite the universe into our dwellings is to run great risk of being turned out of doors ourselves.

But this is not all. It is not the physical world alone that the physician has to explore to its utmost bounds; the other world of the human mind and its emotions no less claims his study. Not only those among you who will devote yourselves to the treatment of mental disease will be called upon to trace out the mutual workings of mind and body, and note, with the utmost delicacy you can attain, the point at which a bodily disorder begins to react on the emotions; or when a mental shock or strain, or worry too much succumbed to, reveals itself in impaired functions of the body; this is the common duty of us all, and one which daily acquires a greater urgency.

More than ever now the medical man becomes, or should become, the friend, the confidant, the counsellor of his patient. A place too seldom filled by him, yet impossible to be filled except by him, stands vacant-that of a friend whose trained knowledge and quick sympathy should be able to unravel for each man and each woman, in these perplexed and restless days, what is merely physical, what mental, in their distresses; where it is only an impaired digestion that fills the mind with morbid phantoms, or where an unwise or excessive care makes discord in the delicate › harmony of the nerves, and sends perverted currents to every organ.

More than ever now the physician must have knowledge of the soul; must feel, with finer senses, other pulses; and measure heats and chills which no thermometer can gauge. The mind, the passions, are his study; unwitting of these, or unregardful, half his work-often the larger half-is unperformed. Calm himself, he must for his fellow know ambition and despair; must feel how fiercely burns desire, and with what a leaden weight failure seals up the springs of life. He must enter into the depths of another man's remorse, or how can he know how it corrodes the frame, and turns even the healing waters to bitterness? And his soul, too, must thrill with

another's joy, lest he ascribe fancied powers to his drugs, and turn the very gladness of one man to the mortal damage of another. For who will tell us how much medicine has suffered by false virtues ascribed to remedies, because, perhaps, the doctor has wrapped up hope with his pills, or a sudden gladness has seemed to make an ordinary draught a very cup of Life?

But not even then is our full task accomplished. As students of the mind as well as the body, we approach man under a fresh aspect. He is no more a mere series of disconnected units, each of which may be adequately regarded by itself. In his intellectual and moral nature man reveals himself as

a being of a new order: a wider unity dawns upon us. In science, in art, in social order, and in moral life, Man lives on from age to age: he grows, develops, rises through lower into higher forms. Nor have watchful eyes been wanting to note the parallel which this life of consciousness affords to the history of bodily development. It is an Organic Being that we see in Man; in Man, who thinks from age to age more truly and feels more widely, creates social order, and lays down and changes laws; and the science of his life and growth opens before us a new and larger physiology. In the central government and its agents we

see again the brain and nerves; in the producers of commodities and those who distribute them, down to the smallest retail dealer, there stand before us a transfigured digestive and circulatory system. We cannot, if we would, refuse the parallel; and, indeed, it fascinates us by its interest. We look back to the history of the body politic, and note how, in its earliest form-like the earliest form of the other body—it is an undistinguished mass, every part of which performs functions that are the same; how by degrees, owing to increasing wants and varying relations, special portions of the body, or the society, assume special functions, and, as the special aptitudes develop, become unfitted for any other; how these specially organised parts are brought into more and more complex union, and become mutually more and more dependent: one life working visibly through the varied whole, and finding its organs ready to its hand.

If the structure of the lower creatures claims our study, and we feel that we cannot expect to understand aright the human frame unless we know also these less complex forms, how can we withhold our study from this grander life arising thus before our eyes, and in the progress of which we and our own efforts are tributary powers? What would we not give to

see an ultimate atom' with our microscopes? But, behold, we ourselves are the very atoms we explore; and the mysterious forces which attract them and repel, we feel they group our fellow-men around us, and our responsive energies reveal to us their power.

So we are swept on, even beyond our goal: we cannot stop where we would. This wonderful frame of man's, which is our special business, is no end; it floats, as it were, on a larger stream, to which we must commit ourselves if we would grasp it rightly. Could we know one molecule of our own frame, and its diseases, if we ignored the life it served or marred? How, then, these atom-minds and bodies of our fellows, save by knowledge of the life they help to constitute?

This is no novelty. The science of medicine,' says the physician in Plato's 'Banquet,' 'is, in a word, a knowledge of the love affairs of the body; and he is the most skilful physician who can trace these operations of the good and evil love, can make the one change places with the other, can attract Love to those parts in which he is absent, and expel him from those which he ought not to occupy. Our progenitor, Esculapius, through the skill which he possessed to inspire love and concord in these contending principles, established the science of medicine.'

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