Fain would I believe that many of you would make enduring records. Yet each can do his best, and I doubt not each will do it. You have so much to encourage you, so comparatively little to hamper or hold back. Glorious is your work, glorious may be your fulfillment of it. We have lived in a goodly time; you will enjoy one still more goodly. With scientific progress, whose like the world has never known, and with an altruism which makes the world constantly better, you will be able to do things never done by your predecessors. "'Tis coming up the steeps of time, And this old world is growing brighter! We may not see its dawn sublime, Yet high hopes make the heart throb lighter! Our dust may slumber underground When it awakens the world in wonder; But we have felt it gathering 'round! We have heard its voice of distant thunder. 'Tis coming! Yes, 'tis coming! "'Tis coming now, that glorious time Foretold by seers and sung in story, For which, when thinking was a crime, Souls leaped to heaven from scaffolds gory! They passed. But lo! the work they wrought! Now the crowned hopes of centuries blossom, The lightning of their living thought Is flashing through us, brain and bosom; 'Tis coming! Yes, 'tis coming." XI THE EVOLUTION OF THE SURGEON FROM THE BARBER If one attempt to scan the field of the history of medicine, to take note of all the fallacies and superstitions which have befogged men's minds, and brought about what _now_ seem to be the most absurd and revolting views and practices of times gone by, and if one search deliberately for that which is of curious nature, or calculated to serve as a riddle difficult of solution, he will scarcely in the tomes which he may consult find anything stranger than the close connection, nay, even the identity maintained for centuries, between the trade of the barber and the craft of the surgeon. Even after having studied history and the various laws passed at different times, he will still miss the predominant yet concealed reason for this state of affairs. This will be found to be, in the words of Paget, the "maintenance of vested rights as if they were better than the promotion of knowledge." He will wonder also why women were licensed to practise surgery in the fourteenth century and prevented in the nineteenth, or why specialties were legally recognized in the sixteenth century only to lose their dignity and identity a little later.