I can bear the voice of some rough iconoclast addressing the Anatomist and the Chemist in tones of contemptuous indignation: “What is this stuff with which you are cramming the brains of young men who are to hold the lives of the community in their hands? Here is a man fallen in a fit; you can tell me all about the eight surfaces of the two processes of the palate bone, but you have not had the sense to loosen that man's neck-cloth, and the old women are all calling you a fool? Here is a fellow that has just swallowed poison. I want something to turn his stomach inside out at the shortest notice. Oh, you have forgotten the dose of the sulphate of zinc, but you remember the formula for the production of alloxan!” “Look you, Master Doctor,--if I go to a carpenter to come and stop a leak in my roof that is flooding the house, do you suppose I care whether he is a botanist or not? Cannot a man work in wood without knowing all about endogens and exogens, or must he attend Professor Gray's Lectures before he can be trusted to make a box-trap? If my horse casts a shoe, do you think I will not trust a blacksmith to shoe him until I have made sure that he is sound on the distinction between the sesquioxide and the protosesquioxide of iron?” --But my scientific labor is to lead to useful results by and by, in the next generation, or in some possible remote future.-- “Diavolo!” as your Dr. Rabelais has it,--answers the iconoclast,--“what is that to me and my colic, to me and my strangury? I pay the Captain of the Cunard steamship to carry me quickly and safely to Liverpool, not to make a chart of the Atlantic for after voyagers! If Professor Peirce undertakes to pilot me into Boston Harbor and runs me on Cohasset rocks, what answer is it to tell me that he is Superintendent of the Coast Survey? No, Sir! I want a plain man in a pea-jacket and a sou'wester, who knows the channel of Boston Harbor, and the rocks of Boston Harbor, and the distinguished Professor is quite of my mind as to the matter, for I took the pains to ask him before I ventured to use his name in the way of illustration.” I do not know how the remarks of the image-breaker may strike others, but I feel that they put me on my defence with regard to much of my teaching. Some years ago I ventured to show in an introductory Lecture how very small a proportion of the anatomical facts taught in a regular course, as delivered by myself and others, had any practical bearing whatever on the treatment of disease. How can I, how can any medical teacher justify himself in teaching anything that is not like to be of practical use to a class of young men who are to hold in their hands the balance in which life and death, ease and anguish, happiness and wretchedness are to be daily weighed?