STRUCTURE, ACTION, AND THOUGHT. 751 



them to paper and thus gaining good marks in competitive ex- 

 aminations without considering in the least whether these state- 

 ments are true, or whether the facts, so called, are likely to help 

 him at all in his future life. The period during which I regularly 

 attended the meetings of this society was a transitional one, be- 

 cause the number of examinations, competitive and professional, 

 was then beginning to increase. I trust it is not true, but I have 

 heard that since my time the examination incubus has been 

 weighing even more heavily upon men than it did then, and has 

 been interfering to some extent with the activity of the discus- 

 sions in this society. Yet even if it were true it can hardly be 

 wondered at, for it seems to me that we are living at a period 

 which is not only one of the utmost activity, one of the most 

 startling progress, and one of the keenest excitement for all en- 

 gaged in research, but at the same time it is one of the utmost 

 difficulty for all those who are engaged in the study of medicine, 

 surgery, and the allied sciences. For the number of facts is not 

 only enormously great, but is daily increasing at a rate which 

 threatens to make it almost impossible for any ordinary memory 

 to retain them all. Yet the darkest hour is that before the dawn, 

 and I believe that shortly medical study will become very much 

 easier. The great difficulty that the student has in remembering 

 facts is that they are isolated and not co-ordinated together. In 

 a book on memory which I once read the writer summed up his 

 whole science in one sentence : " Observe, reflect, link thought 

 with thought, and think of the impressions." This is easy to say 

 but not so easy to do, and it is the difficulty of linking thought 

 with thought that makes the tax upon the memory of the medical 

 student so exceedingly great. 



Now it seems to me that one of the objects which this society 

 should set before itself should be not only that of training its 

 members in the art of speaking and writing, of sifting facts and 

 criticising statements, but of linking together and co-ordinating 

 the data which they are called upon to recollect. When the sci- 

 ence of astronomy was younger and the earth was supposed to be 

 the center of the universe, the motions of the planets were known 

 with sufficient certainty to calculate eclipses, but they could only 

 be brought into conformity with their supposed relationship to 

 the earth as the center by the most cumbrous system of hypoth- 

 eses, and by ideas of cycles and epicycles which must have bur- 

 dened the astronomer's memory to the last degree. So soon, how- 

 ever, as the sun and not the earth was recognized to be the center 

 of our system the whole of the observed facts were seen to be in 

 complete harmony, and the relationship, comparatively speaking, 

 as simple as A B C. In our own time we have seen somewhat 

 similar occurrences in regard to the relationship of animals and 



