And so I have thus placed before you five bright and shining illustrations of what brains and application can accomplish, selected from different lands in order to show that medicine has no country, and from a previous century in order that you may the better realize how meagre was their environment in those days as compared with that which you enjoy. Perhaps you will say, "there were giants in those days." True, but the race has not entirely died out. While Spencer and Virchow live one may not call the race extinct, nor can the times which have produced such men as Helmholtz, DuBois-Reymond, Darwin, Huxley, Leidy or Marsh, fail to still produce an occasional worthy successor. But it is time now to draw this rather rambling discourse to an end. The effort has been partly to attract your attention to some of the side lights by which the vista of your futures may be the more pleasantly illumined, and partly, by placing before you brief accounts of the careers of some of your illustrious predecessors, to show that eminence in medical science inheres in no particular nationality nor race, neither comes it of heredity nor by request. Like salvation it is available to all who fulfill the prerequisites. It is a composite product of application, direction, fervor in study, logical powers of mind, honesty of purpose, capability of observation, alertness to improve opportunities, all combined with that somewhat rare gift of tact, which last constitutes the so-called personal equation by which many humanitarian problems are solved. _Study nature for facts; study lives of great men for inspiration how to use them._ "Were a star quenched on high For ages would its light, Still traveling downward from the sky, Shine on our mortal sight. So when a great man dies For years beyond our ken, The light he leaves behind him lies Upon the paths of men." If then you regulate your mental habits by such a code other habits will of necessity fall into the proper line. The only other admonition I would give you in parting is summed up in these beautiful lines of our own Bryant: "So live that when thy summons comes to join The innumerable caravan which moves To that mysterious realm where each shall take His chamber in the silent halls of death, Thou go not like the quarry slave at night, Scourged to his dungeon, but sustained and soothed By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch About him and lies down to pleasant dreams." That the sentiment is not new, however, will appear in this other and ancient version which Sir William Jones has thus rendered from the Persian: "On parent knees, a naked newborn child, Weeping thou satst while all around thee smiled, So live that, sinking to thy last long sleep, Calm mayst thou smile while all around thee weep." X THE CAREER OF THE ARMY SURGEON[7]