154 



IHE ALUMNI JOURNAL 



MEDICINE AND PHARMACY * 



By N. H. martin, F.L.S.. F.R.M.S., President of the British Pharmaceutical Conference. 



At the outset of my address I desire 

 to conform to a custom which I think we 

 do well to honor, and that is to express 

 to you my sense of the distinction which 

 you have conferred upon me by electing 

 me to be your President: To be thought 

 by my confreres to be fitted, in some 

 small degree, to stand in the place which 

 has been occupied and adorned by such 

 distinguished men and Pharmacists as 

 Deane, Hanbury, Stoddart, Brady, Red- 

 wood and others who have occupied this 

 chair, is a sufficient cause for modest 

 and honorable self-respect, and I should 

 not be human if I did not appreciate that 

 honor and feel proud of the dignity. I 

 do not propose to occup}- your time by 

 expressions about my own un worthiness, 

 for although the fact, and the causes of 

 it, are better known to me than they can 

 possibly be to you, the attempt to put 

 them into words would miss that ring of 

 true sincerity which I have tried to make 

 the touchstone of my life. I prefer to 

 accept your decision in silence as to my 

 own shortcomings, and to tell you that 

 since your choice has fallen on me, I 

 have done my best to make my own un- 

 worthiness more worthy of your accept- 

 ance. 



As you are all aware, we are indebted 

 to the courteous invitation of the Phar- 

 macists of this city and neighborhood for 

 our meeting here to-day, and I congrat- 

 ulate the Conference upon the opportu- 

 nity of assembling for the first time in 

 its history in this ancient University 

 city. 



Oxford is as fresh to me, as I have no 

 doubt it is to many of you, but we shall 

 every one of us share an Englishman's 

 just pride in the renown of this historic 



* Pharm. Jour. Trans., Aug. 4, :8q4. Read at the 31st 

 Annual Meeting of the British Pharmaceutical Confer- 

 ence. 



seat of learning. Perhaps to some of us 

 it was a dream and a hope of our early 

 days that our own education would have 

 embraced an Oxford or Cambridge ca- 

 reer, but such dream may have been 

 rudely dispelled by the force of circum- 

 stances, and the ideal of education 

 which we thought would have 

 been obtained here, by the culture 

 of surroundings, we have only been able 

 to seek after by much plodding and 

 gleaning in outside fields. If I were 

 free to occupy your time with thoughts 

 other than those connected with Phar- 

 macy, what a fruitful source of inspira- 

 tion this place would be. The beauty 

 and the history of its buildings, the men 

 who have walked these streets, and lin- 

 gered in these ancient halls and colleges, 

 and who have gone out from here to in- 

 fluence, so profoundly, the whole history 

 of the world would indeed furnish any 

 audience of Englishmen with food for 

 profitable meditation. In our thoughts 

 about Oxford most of us will have con- 

 nected it with classical and mathemaiical 

 studies, and with the remembrance that 

 here have been trained some of the deep 

 thinkers in the realms of philosophy, of 

 theology and of history. To us, as 

 Pharmacists, however, and as workers in 

 the domain of Natural History and Sci- 

 ence, the Oxford Museum cannot fail to 

 be an object of the deepest interest, and 

 while I hope you will take away from 

 Oxford many delightful mental pictures 

 of art, of architecture and of natural 

 beauty, I would commend the museum, 

 and all that pertains to it, to your most 

 thoughtful attention and study. I may 

 not linger here, but I should like to 

 point out the wide difference which ex- 

 ists between the Oxford Museum and 

 our ordinary conception — and I am afraid 



