My advice to every teacher less experienced than myself would be, therefore:  Do not fret over the details you have to omit; you probably teach altogether too many as it is.  Individuals may learn a thing with once hearing it, but the only way of teaching a whole class is by enormous repetition, representation, and illustration in all possible forms.  Now and then you will have a young man on your benches like the late Waldo Burnett,—­not very often, if you lecture half a century.  You cannot pretend to lecture chiefly for men like that,—­a Mississippi raft might as well take an ocean-steamer in tow.  To meet his wants you would have to leave the rest of your class behind and that you must not do.  President Allen of Jefferson College says that his instruction has been successful in proportion as it has been elementary.  It may be a humiliating statement, but it is one which I have found true in my own experience.

To the student I would say, that however plain and simple may be our teaching, he must expect to forget much which he follows intelligently in the lecture-room.  But it is not the same as if he had never learned it.  A man must get a thing before he can forget it.  There is a great world of ideas we cannot voluntarily recall,—­they are outside the limits of the will.  But they sway our conscious thought as the unseen planets influence the movements of those within the sphere of vision.  No man knows how much he knows,—­how many ideas he has,—­any more than he knows how many blood-globules roll in his veins.  Sometimes accident brings back here and there one, but the mind is full of irrevocable remembrances and unthinkable thoughts, which take a part in all its judgments as indestructible forces.  Some of you must feel your scientific deficiencies painfully after your best efforts.  But every one can acquire what is most essential.  A man of very moderate ability may be a good physician, if he devotes himself faithfully to the work.  More than this, a positively dull man, in the ordinary acceptation of the term, sometimes makes a safer practitioner than one who has, we will say, five per cent. more brains than his average neighbor, but who thinks it is fifty per cent. more.  Skulls belonging to this last variety of the human race are more common, I may remark, than specimens like the Neanderthal cranium, a cast of which you will find on the table in the Museum.

Whether the average talent be high or low, the Colleges of the land must make the best commodity they can out of such material as the country and the cities furnish them.  The community must have Doctors as it must have bread.  It uses up its Doctors just as it wears out its shoes, and requires new ones.  All the bread need not be French 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.