Piorry, percussionist and poet, expert alike in the resonances of the thoracic cavity and those of the rhyming vocabulary?—­I think life has not yet done with the vivacious Ricord, whom I remember calling the Voltaire of pelvic literature,—­a sceptic as to the morality of the race in general, who would have submitted Diana to treatment with his mineral specifics, and ordered a course of blue pills for the vestal virgins.

Ricord was born at the beginning of the century, and Piorry some years earlier.  Cruveilhier, who died in 1874, is still remembered by his great work on pathological anatomy; his work on descriptive anatomy has some things which I look in vain for elsewhere.  But where is Civiale,—­where are Orfila, Gendrin, Rostan, Biett, Alibert,—­jolly old Baron Alibert, whom I remember so well in his broad-brimmed hat, worn a little jauntily on one side, calling out to the students in the court-yard of the Hospital St. Louis, “Enfans de la methode naturelle, etes-vous tous ici?” “Children of the natural method [his own method of classification of skin diseases,] are you all here?” All here, then, perhaps; all where, now?

My show of ghosts is over.  It is always the same story that old men tell to younger ones, some few of whom will in their turn repeat the tale, only with altered names, to their children’s children.

   Like phantoms painted on the magic slide,
   Forth from the darkness of the past we glide,
   As living shadows for a moment seen
   In airy pageant on the eternal screen,
   Traced by a ray from one unchanging flame,
   Then seek the dust and stillness whence we came.

Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse, whom I well remember, came back from Leyden, where he had written his Latin graduating thesis, talking of the learned Gaubius and the late illustrious Boerhaave and other dead Dutchmen, of whom you know as much, most of you, as you do of Noah’s apothecary and the family physician of Methuselah, whose prescriptions seem to have been lost to posterity.  Dr. Lloyd came back to Boston full of the teachings of Cheselden and Sharpe, William Hunter, Smellie, and Warner; Dr. James Jackson loved to tell of Mr. Cline and to talk of Mr. John Hunter; Dr. Reynolds would give you his recollections of Sir Astley Cooper and Mr. Abernethy; I have named the famous Frenchmen of my student days; Leyden, Edinburgh, London, Paris, were each in turn the Mecca of medical students, just as at the present day Vienna and Berlin are the centres where our young men crowd for instruction.  These also must sooner or later yield their precedence and pass the torch they hold to other hands.  Where shall it next flame at the head of the long procession?  Shall it find its old place on the shores of the Gulf of Salerno, or shall it mingle its rays with the northern aurora up among the fiords of Norway,—­or shall it be borne across the Atlantic and reach the banks of the Charles, where Agassiz and Wyman have taught, where Hagen still teaches, glowing like his own Lampyris splendidula, with enthusiasm, where the first of American botanists and the ablest of American surgeons are still counted in the roll of honor of our great University?