"We are met to celebrate the beginning of the second century of the Medical School's existence, and the simultaneous completion of its new building. It is a hundred years since John Warren, Benjamin Waterhouse and Aaron Dexter were installed as professors of anatomy and surgery, theory and practice, and _materia medica_ respectively, and without the aid of collections or hospitals began to lecture in some small, rough rooms in the basement of Harvard Hall, and in a part of little Holden Chapel, at Cambridge. From that modest beginning the school has gradually grown until it counts a staff of forty-seven teachers, ten professors, six assistant professors, nine instructors, thirteen clinical instructors, and nine assistants--working in the spacious and well-equipped building, which we are shortly to inspect, and commanding every means of instruction and research which laboratories, dispensaries and hospitals can supply. Out of our present strength and abundance we look back to the founding of the school and to its slow and painful development. We bear in our hearts the three generations of teachers who have served this school with disinterested diligence and zeal. We recall their unrequited labors, their frequent anxieties and conflicts and their unfulfilled hopes; we bring to mind the careful plantings and the tardy harvests, reaped at last, but not by them that sowed. We meet, indeed, to rejoice in present prosperity and fair prospects, but we would first salute our predecessors and think with reverence and gratitude of their toils and sacrifices, the best fruits of which our generation has inherited.