Mr. Plant might be termed a medical benefactor,--a health restorer,--because of the results of his work for the South and the North as well. In no department of scientific advancement during the last half-century has progress been more marked than in the department of medicine. The healing art, in its lessening of pain and in the prevention and cure of disease, has made, and is daily making, the most wonderful discoveries. What a boon to suffering humanity was the discovery of ether by Dr. Charles T. Jackson, of Boston, in 1846, who found that by the inhaling of this anæsthetic the patient is rendered unconscious of pain. Vaccine inoculation, introduced by Dr. Jenner in 1799, has prevented the spread of that much dreaded disease, small-pox. The name of Dr. Koch will long be held in grateful remembrance for his earnest efforts to cure consumption, as will those of Pasteur to cure hydrophobia. The Southern States to-day have thousands of people in ordinary good health, many of them in excellent health, who, ten, twenty, or thirty years ago, were given up by their physicians as past recovery and soon to die. But thirty years ago the modes of travel to the South and the lack of adequate provision there for invalids were such as only a person in fair health could bear. Through Mr. Plant’s efforts in large measure, both of these requisites for a sick man, or a delicate woman, have reached a state of perfection difficult to improve. At the banquet given to Mr. Plant at Leesburg, Florida, in the winter of 1896, one of the speakers referring to what Mr. Plant had done for the North as well as for the South, said: “In the ‘Dixie’ land he has made the desert to bloom like the rose, changed waste places into fertile fields, the swamps into a sanitarium, the sand heap into a Champs Élysées, the Hillsborough into a Seine, and reproduced the palace of Versailles on the banks of Tampa Bay, and away up in freezing, shivering New England and Canada, when the doctor had written his last recipe and the druggist had emptied his last bottle and the undertaker was at the front door, our friend has placed the patient in a wheeled palace, and signalled, ‘On to Richmond,’ not to die, but to live; and old Virginia has smiled on the dying man, North Carolina has fairly laughed aloud, South Carolina has taken him into her warm embrace, and Florida has thrown flowers not on his coffin but on the resurrected Lazarus, and the family have invited their friends, not to a funeral, but to a feast. The Plant System ships have ploughed the Gulf of Mexico and spanned the Caribbean Sea, and have brought health and happiness to many homes over which bereavement and sorrow were hovering like the black angel of death.”