Well, now, gentlemen, I am sure my colleagues in this examination will bear me out in saying that I have not been exaggerating the evils and defects which are current--have been current--in a large quantity of the physiological teaching the results of which come before examiners. And it becomes a very interesting question to know how all this comes about, and in what way it can be remedied. How it comes about will be perfectly obvious to any one who has considered the growth of medicine. I suppose that medicine and surgery first began by some savage more intelligent than the rest, discovering that a certain herb was good for a certain pain, and that a certain pull, somehow or other, set a dislocated joint right. I suppose all things had their humble beginnings, and medicine and surgery were in the same condition. People who wear watches know nothing about watchmaking. A watch goes wrong and it stops; you see the owner giving it a shake, or, if he is very bold, he opens the case, and gives the balance-wheel a push. Gentlemen, that is empirical practice, and you know what are the results upon the watch. I should think you can divine what are the results of analogous operations upon the human body. And because men of sense very soon found that such were the effects of meddling with very complicated machinery they did not understand, I suppose the first thing, as being the easiest, was to study the nature of the works of the human watch, and the next thing was to study the way the parts worked together, and the way the watch worked. Thus, by degrees, we have had growing up our body of anatomists, or knowers of the construction of the human watch, and our physiologists, who know how the machine works. And just as any sensible man, who has a valuable watch, does not meddle with it himself, but goes to some one who has studied watchmaking, and understands what the effect of doing this or that may be; so, I suppose, the man who, having charge of that valuable machine, his own body, wants to have it kept in good order, comes to a professor of the medical art for the purpose of having it set right, believing that, by deduction from the facts of structure and from the facts of function, the physician will divine what may be the matter with his bodily watch at that particular time, and what may be the best means of setting it right. If that may be taken as a just representation of the relation of the theoretical branches of medicine--what we may call the institutes of medicine, to use an old term--to the practical branches, I think it will be obvious to you that they are of prime and fundamental importance. Whatever tends to affect the teaching of them injuriously must tend to destroy and to disorganise the whole fabric of the medical art. I think every sensible man has seen this long ago; but the difficulties in the way of attaining good teaching in the different branches of the theory, or institutes, of medicine are very serious. It