294 ITS BEARING ON MEDICAL PRACTICE. 



eloquent oration of Professor RoUeston. I felt confident, however, that 

 I i)0ssessed one advantage that he did not; I was a stranger in Oxford, 

 and believed that my faults in matter and st3ie would be leniently criti- 

 cised ; in this expectation, I am happy to say I am not disappointed ; 

 and again I thank yon for your kindness. Two other advantages I share 

 with him, which have contributed to his address as much as to my own — 

 a profound respect and reverence for all honest laborers in search of truth, 

 whether they have preceded us by twenty years or by two thousand 

 years; and an unwavering confidence and faith in the future that lie ;i 

 before the science of medicine. We traverse a sea mapped with imper- 

 fect charts, but assured of a safe guide in our compass and stars; but 

 Ave cannot afford to neglect a single rock or shoal, buoyed for us by the 

 skill and care of those that have preceded us. Let us follow their 

 example, and mark with conscientious care, for our successors, the dan- 

 gers v\e ourselves discover and escape. 



Assembled, as we are, within the halls of the University of Oxford, 

 the center and heart of all that is intellectual and religious in the life 

 of England — a university that borrows its accurate logic, as well as 

 its refined ethics, from the lips of Aristotle; that reverences Euclid as 

 the fountain and source of its elegant geometr}^; and sits at the feet of 

 Homer, Pindar, and Eschylus, to learn its poetry- — we need not fear that 

 Hippocrates and Galen will ever want admirers and students; but the 

 Oxford of to-day has taught us, what many did not anticipate, that she 

 is equally ready and skillful, as she has proved herself to be in cultivat- 

 ing literature, to devote her vast intellectual energies to the encour- 

 agement and development of the natural sciences, based upon the solid 

 and only permanent foundation of mathematical research. Tlie efforts 

 made within the last few years by Oxford to encourage within her walls 

 the mathematical and natural sciences, have won for her the respect, 

 and wanned toward her the hearts, of all that search for truth in the 

 study of nature. Our brothers in Oxford, like the Athenians at Syra- 

 cuse, have gone on board the fleet, while we watch them from the shore, 

 sympathizing in the sea-fight; as they win, we shout; when they fail, 

 we weep. 



Long may the union of the far distant, but never to be forgotten, past, 

 with the living present, that now exists in Oxford, continue. No science, 

 no profession, can benefit so much by it as that of medicine. 



