Twenty years ago the first popular lectures on anatomy and physiology were given, and a corps of lecturers came up and swept over the whole country, with much of interest and instruction to the people and no small profit to themselves. These lectures called the attention of educators to these sciences. Text-books for schools and colleges were prepared, and anatomy and physiology became common studies for the young. In various ways, through school-books and magazines and newspapers, there has accumulated a stock of popular knowledge of these sciences, and an apprehension of the limit of their practical usefulness, which have quite destroyed the demand for lectures upon them. Though a new generation has risen since the lecture on anatomy and physiology was the rage, no leaner field could possibly be found than that which the country now presents to the popular lecturer on these sciences. These facts are interesting in themselves, and they serve to illustrate the truth of that which has been stated touching lectures upon general historical and scientific subjects. For facts alone the modern American public does not go hungry. American life is crowded with facts, to which the newspaper gives daily record and diffusion. Ideas, motives, thoughts, these are always in demand. Men wish for nothing more than to know how to classify their facts, what to do with them, how to govern them, and how far to be governed by them; and the man who takes the facts with which the popular life has come into contact and association, and draws from them their nutritive and motive power, and points out their relations to individual and universal good, and organizes around them the popular thought, and uses them to give direction to the popular life, and does all this with masterly skill, is the man whose houses are never large enough to contain those who throng to hear him. This is the popular lecturer, _par excellence_. The people have an earnest desire to know what a strong, independent, free man has to say about those facts which touch the experience, the direction, and the duty of their daily life; and the lecturer who with a hearty human sympathy addresses himself to this desire, and enters upon the service with genuine enthusiasm, wins the highest reward there is to be won in his field of effort.