It was something to have unlearned the pernicious habit of constantly giving poisons to a patient, as if they were good in themselves, of drawing off the blood which he would want in his struggle with disease, of making him sore and wretched with needless blisters, of turning his stomach with unnecessary nauseous draught and mixtures,—­only because he was sick and something must be done.  But there were positive as well as negative facts to be learned, and some of us, I fear, came home rich in the negatives of the expectant practice, poor in the resources which many a plain country practitioner had ready in abundance for the relief and the cure of disease.  No one instructor can be expected to do all for a student which he requires.  Louis taught us who followed him the love of truth, the habit of passionless listening to the teachings of nature, the most careful and searching methods of observation, and the sure means of getting at the results to be obtained from them in the constant employment of accurate tabulation.  He was not a showy, or eloquent, or, I should say, a very generally popular man, though the favorite, almost the idol, of many students, especially Genevese and Bostonians.  But he was a man of lofty and admirable scientific character, and his work will endure in its influences long after his name is lost sight of save to the faded eyes of the student of medical literature.

Many other names of men more or less famous in their day, and who were teaching while I was in Paris, come up before me.  They are but empty sounds for the most part in the ears of persons of not more than middle age.  Who of you knows anything of Richerand, author of a very popular work on Physiology, commonly put into the student’s hands when I first began to ask for medical text-books?  I heard him lecture once, and have had his image with me ever since as that of an old, worn-out man,—­a venerable but dilapidated relic of an effete antiquity.  To verify this impression I have just looked out the dates of his birth and death, and find that he was eighteen years younger than the speaker who is now addressing you.  There is a terrible parallax between the period before thirty and that after threescore and ten, as two men of those ages look, one with naked eyes, one through his spectacles, at the man of fifty and thereabout.  Magendie, I doubt not you have all heard of.  I attended but one of his lectures.  I question if one here, unless some contemporary of my own has strayed into the amphitheatre,—­knows anything about Marjolin.  I remember two things about his lectures on surgery, the deep tones of his voice as he referred to his oracle,—­the earlier writer, Jean Louis Petit,—­and his formidable snuffbox.  What he taught me lies far down, I doubt not, among the roots of my knowledge, but it does not flower out in any noticeable blossoms, or offer me any very obvious fruits.  Where now is the fame of Bouillaud, Professor and Deputy, the Sangrado of his time?  Where is the renown of