It is indispensable to the stability of our movement that very thorough provision be made for the obstetrical education of all our medical graduates. I do not think that any young woman physician is properly equipped for her future difficult career unless she has been to a great extent responsible for at least thirty midwifery patients, of whose cases she has made careful and discriminating records, and has had the opportunity of observing a great many more patients, in addition to the drill in all operative manœuvres that can be given in college. We need a great maternity department, thoroughly organized, which, whilst arranged with kindest consideration for the poor, will put our students through a severe drill, such as is considered necessary at La Maternité in Paris. That institution, which receives annually an average of 2,500 patients, having over 10,000 applications in the year, is not only an invaluable practical school, but it has reduced the mortality amongst its patients to a minimum; and the searching method of instruction there pursued could be studied by us to great advantage as we try to secure a well-organized maternity charity for our students in London. Such a charity, if humanely planned, would be a blessing to poor mothers, and it would to a great extent remove the reproach of being obliged to send our enterprising young doctors abroad because London does not afford them sufficient necessary practical training. But time warns me to close these remarks, although I would gladly have enlarged upon the primary importance of preventive medicine--the medicine of the future--for it is quite certain that the greater part of disease, even including many surgical operations, is preventable disease. It is now, unfortunately, the case that unavoidable absorption in the treatment of disease makes the practical physician too often ignore the yet larger duty of preventing it. I have tried to show (1) That women, from their constitutional adaptation to creation and guardianship, are thus fitted for a special and noble part in the advancement of the healing art. (2) That the cultivation of the intellectual faculties necessary to secure their moral influence requires a long and patient training by methods that do not injure morality. (3) That the noblest department of medicine to which we can devote our energies, will be through that guardianship of the rising generation which is the especial privilege of the family physician. In conclusion, my young friends and fellow-workers, I would ask you all to join with me in the pledge which I gave more than forty years ago to the Chancellor of the Western University, who handed to me our first Diploma of Doctor of Medicine. I then promised ‘that it should be the effort of my life to shed honour on that diploma.’ This is the pledge that we must all prepare for when entering the noble profession of medicine; in receiving honour we must add lustre to it, or we become unworthy of it.