Now the value of a knowledge of physical science as a means of getting on, is indubitable.  There are hardly any of our trades, except the merely huckstering ones, in which some knowledge of science may not be directly profitable to the pursuer of that occupation.  As industry attains higher stages of its development, as its processes become more complicated and refined, and competition more keen, the sciences are dragged in, one by one, to take their share in the fray; and he who can best avail himself of their help is the man who will come out uppermost in that struggle for existence which goes on as fiercely beneath the smooth surface of modern society, as among the wild inhabitants of the woods.

But, in addition to the bearing of science on ordinary practical life, let me direct your attention to its immense influence on several of the professions.  I ask any one who has adopted the calling of an engineer, how much time he lost when he left school, because he had to devote himself to pursuits which were absolutely novel and strange, and of which he had not obtained the remotest conception from his instructors?  He had to familiarize himself with ideas of the course and powers of Nature, to which his attention had never been directed during his school-life, and to learn, for the first time, that a world of facts lies outside and beyond the world of words.  I appeal to those who know what Engineering is, to say how far I am right in respect to that profession; but with regard to another, of no less importance, I shall venture to speak of my own knowledge.  There is no one of who may not at any moment be thrown, bound and foot by physical incapacity, into the hands of a medical practitioner.  The chances of life and death for all and each of us may, at any moment, depend on the skill with which that practitioner is able to make out what is wrong in our bodily frames, and on his ability to apply the proper remedy to the defect.

The necessities of modern life are such, and the class from which the medical profession is chiefly recruited is so situated, that few medical men can hope to spend more than three or four, or it may be five, years in the pursuit of those studies which are immediately germane to physic.  How is that all too brief period spent at present?  I speak as an old examiner, having served some eleven or twelve years in that capacity in the University of London, and therefore having a practical acquaintance with the subject; but I might fortify myself by the authority of the President of the College of Surgeons, Mr. Quain, whom I heard the other day in an admirable address (the Hunterian Oration) deal fully and wisely with this very topic[3].