FERMKNTATION. 561 
This preventible destruction is going on to-day, and it 
has been permitted to go on for ages, without a whisper of 
information regarding its cause being vouchsafed to the 
suffering sentient world. We have been scourged by invis- 
ible throngs, attacked from impenetrable ambuscades, and 
it is only to-day that the light of science is being let in 
upon the murderous dominion of our foes. Facts like 
these excite in me the thought that the rule and govern- 
ance of this universe are different from what we in' our 
youth supposed them to be that the inscrutable Power, 
at once terrible and beneficent, in whom we live and move 
and have our being and our end, is to be propitiated by 
means different to those usually resorted to. The first 
requisite toward such propitiation is knowledge; the second 
inaction, shaped and illuminated by that knowledge. Of 
knowledge we already see the dawn, which will open out 
by and by to perfect day; while the action which is to 
follow has its unfailing source and stimulus in the moral 
and emotional nature of man in his desire for personal 
well-being, in his sense of duty, in his compassionate sym- 
pathy with the sufferings of his fellow-men. " How often," 
says Dr. William Budd in his celebrated work on Typhoid 
Fever " How often have I seen in past days, in the single 
narrow chamber of the day-laborer's cottage the father in 
the coffin, the mother in the sick-bed in muttering delirium, 
and nothing to relieve the desolation of the children but 
the devotion of some poor neighbor, who in too many cases 
paid the penalty of her kindness in becoming herself the 
victim of the same disorder!" From the vantage ground 
already won I look forward with confident hope to the 
triumph of medical art over scenes of misery like that here 
described. The cause of the calamity being once clearly 
revealed, not only to the physician, but to the public, 
whose intelligent co-operation is absolutely essential to suc- 
cess, the final victory of humanity is only a question of 
time. We have already a foretaste of that victory in the 
triumphs of surgery as practiced at your doors. 
