While no one may see far into the future, the maxim, "In time of peace prepare for war," is as true of the medical department as of any. Were it a state secret no one would breathe it here, but it is lamentably true and publicly known that even now we are not prepared as we should be. The awful lessons of the Spanish War have been forgotten. West Point officers have until comparatively recently received no instruction in camp sanitation. Some of us worked hard a while ago to have at least elementary instruction in it introduced into their curriculum. As an illustration I believe that to-day they are taught more about horse's feet and how to keep them in good condition, than about those of their men. Line officers, especially volunteer, have never been too ready to locate their camps where water and drainage were the best, and the awful mortality of the Spanish War was mainly due to preventable disease, while this was due to stupid and inexcusable disregard, on the part of officers of the line (mainly volunteer) of the advice of their medical officers. But, after all, gentlemen, the discouragements you will meet with will be far fewer than those with which your predecessors had to contend, while the pleasant side of your lives will be far pleasanter than was theirs. In fact, I think your lives have in many respects fallen in pleasanter places than have ours. Discipline and order protect you to a large extent from quackery and idiocy. The fads of the day disappear before the appearance of the flag and the sound of the drum. So-called Christian Science finds no place in your curriculum, and it will be long, I trust, before the army chaplain tinctures the military hospital with sectarian therapeutics or an Emanuel church cult. If by entering the army one may escape disgusting influences of this character, then it may become such a refuge that it shall thereby be made both inviting and invincible. It is pleasing to those of us who co-operated in the movement, to have the assurances of the Surgeon General that the establishment of the Medical Reserve Corps has been of actual benefit to the regular Army Medical Department. While the military rank to which its members found themselves suddenly elevated was not so lofty as to cause any attacks of vertigo, none having been up to the present day reported, it at least gives us satisfaction to realize that help may thus be afforded from private life, and that a closer rapport has been effected. And now it is well nigh as difficult a task to appropriately conclude these remarks as to begin them. Men come and go; a few leave imprints of their footsteps; the vast majority make no impression that lingers. "Some when they die, die all; their mouldering clay Is but an emblem of their memories; The space quite closes up through which they passed."