For it has been my privilege to be associated with a body of true and faithful workers; I cannot praise them freely to their faces, or I should be proud to discourse of the harmonious diligence and the noble spirit in which they have toiled together, not merely to teach their several branches, but to elevate the whole standard of teaching.

I may speak with less restraint of those gentlemen who have aided me in the most laborious part of my daily duties, the Demonstrators, to whom the successive classes have owed so much of their instruction.  They rise before me, the dead and the living, in the midst of the most grateful recollections.  The fair, manly face and stately figure of my friend, Dr. Samuel Parkman, himself fit for the highest offices of teaching, yet willing to be my faithful assistant in the time of need, come back to me with the long sigh of regret for his early loss to our earthly companionship.  Every year I speak the eulogy of Dr. Ainsworth’s patient toil as I show his elaborate preparations:  When I take down my “American Cyclopaedia” and borrow instruction from the learned articles of Dr. Kneeland, I cease to regret that his indefatigable and intelligent industry was turned into a broader channel.  And what can I say too cordial of my long associated companion and friend, Dr. Hodges, whose admirable skill, working through the swiftest and surest fingers that ever held a scalpel among us, has delighted class after class, and filled our Museum with monuments which will convey his name to unborn generations?

This day belongs, however, not to myself and my recollections, but to all of us who teach and all of you who listen, whether experts in our specialties or aliens to their mysteries, or timid neophytes just entering the portals of the hall of science.  Look in with me, then, while I attempt to throw some rays into its interior, which shall illuminate a few of its pillars and cornices, and show at the same time how many niches and alcoves remain in darkness.

Science is the topography of ignorance.  From a few elevated points we triangulate vast spaces, inclosing infinite unknown details.  We cast the lead, and draw up a little sand from abysses we may never reach with our dredges.

The best part of our knowledge is that which teaches us where knowledge leaves off and ignorance begins.  Nothing more clearly separates a vulgar from a superior mind, than the confusion in the first between the little that it truly knows, on the one hand, and what it half knows and what it thinks it knows on the other.

That which is true of every subject is especially true of the branch of knowledge which deals with living beings.  Their existence is a perpetual death and reanimation.  Their identity is only an idea, for we put off our bodies many times during our lives, and dress in new suits of bones and muscles.

        “Thou art not thyself;
   For thou exist’st on many a thousand grains
   That issue out of dust.”