The last point to which I may advert is one which concerns the action of the profession itself more than anything else. We have arrangements for teaching, we have arrangements for the testing of qualifications, we have marvellous aids and appliances for the treatment of disease in all sorts of ways; but I do not find in London at the present time, in this little place of four or five million inhabitants which supports so many things, any organisation or any arrangement for advancing the science of medicine, considered as a pure science. I am quite aware that there are medical societies of various kinds; I am not ignorant of the lectureships at the College of Physicians and the College of Surgeons; there is the Brown Institute; and there is the Society for the Advancement of Medicine by Research, but there is no means, so far as I know, by which any person who has the inborn gifts of the investigator and discoverer of new truth, and who desires to apply that to the improvement of medical science, can carry out his intention. In Paris there is the University of Paris, which gives degrees; but there are also the Sorbonne and the Collége de France, places in which professoriates are established for the express purpose of enabling men who have the power of investigation, the power of advancing knowledge and thereby reacting on practice, to do that which it is their special mission to do. I do not know of anything of the kind in London; and if it should so happen that a Claude Bernard or a Ludwig should turn up in London, I really have not the slightest notion of what we could do with him. We could not turn him to account, and I think we should have to export him to Germany or France. I doubt whether that is a good or a wise condition of things. I do not think it is a condition of things which can exist for any great length of time, now that people are every day becoming more and more awake to the importance of scientific investigation and to the astounding and unexpected manner in which it everywhere reacts upon practical pursuits. I should look upon the establishment of some institution of that kind as a recognition on the part of the medical profession in general, that if their great and beneficent work is to be carried on, they must, like other people who have great and beneficent work to do, contribute to the advancement of knowledge in the only way in which experience shows that it can be advanced. * * * * * Footnotes: