A physiological laboratory of to-day is equipped with instruments of research of such ingenious contrivance, such elaborate construction, that one might suppose himself in a workshop where some exquisite fabric was to be wrought, such as Queens love to wear, and Kings do not always love to pay for.  They are, indeed, weaving a charmed web, for these are the looms from which comes the knowledge that clothes the nakedness of the intellect.  Here are the mills that grind food for its hunger, and “is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment?”

But while many of the sciences have so changed that the teachers of the past would hardly know them, it has not been so with the branch I teach, or, rather, with that division of it which is chiefly taught in this amphitheatre.  General anatomy, or histology, on the other hand, is almost all new; it has grown up, mainly, since I began my medical studies.  I never saw a compound microscope during my years of study in Paris.  Individuals had begun to use the instrument, but I never heard it alluded to by either Professors or students.  In descriptive anatomy I have found little to unlearn, and not a great deal that was both new and important to learn.  Trifling additions are made from year to year, not to be despised and not to be overvalued.  Some of the older anatomical works are still admirable, some of the newer ones very much the contrary.  I have had recent anatomical plates brought me for inspection, and I have actually button-holed the book-agent, a being commonly as hard to get rid of as the tar-baby in the negro legend, that I might put him to shame with the imperial illustrations of the bones and muscles in the great folio of Albinus, published in 1747, and the unapproached figures of the lymphatic system of Mascagni, now within a very few years of a century old, and still copied, or, rather, pretended to be copied, in the most recent works on anatomy.

I am afraid that it is a good plan to get rid of old Professors, and I am thankful to hear that there is a movement for making provision for those who are left in need when they lose their offices and their salaries.  I remember one of our ancient Cambridge Doctors once asked me to get into his rickety chaise, and said to me, half humorously, half sadly, that he was like an old horse,—­they had taken off his saddle and turned him out to pasture.  I fear the grass was pretty short where that old servant of the public found himself grazing.  If I myself needed an apology for holding my office so long, I should find it in the fact that human anatomy is much the same study that it was in the days of Vesalius and Fallopius, and that the greater part of my teaching was of such a nature that it could never become antiquated.