.ESCULAPIUS. 493 



tion and love over the dust of departed greatness, and delights 

 to glorify the voices of antiquity by building monuments 

 of wonder and admiration to their greatness. It writes 

 endless commentaries upon what has been done in the past, 

 but has no hopes or aspirations for the future, or what may 

 be done in the hour that now is, or that is to come. In the 

 shade and darkness of long and mournful eclipses the races 

 have wandered. Some colossal man came upon earth and 

 scored the surface of the planet with his name, attributes, 

 and works, and, for hundreds of years, his form arises, 

 darkening the sun of truth and casting a baleful shadow, in 

 the deep darkness of whose night whole races have reposed 

 and slept. They have ever said, " in the shadow of this 

 rock in the wilderness we will rest." The sleepless vigilance, 

 the never-tiring exertion essential to growth, the travail of 

 thought, they will not endure. The search for truth de- 

 mands toughness of fibre of heart and brain, and few men 

 have either will or power to work in the rugged ways lead- 

 ing to the mountain-top, whose head is in the light of the 

 day of knowledge and thought. 



In medicine, as in other departments of human knowl- 

 edge, the past has hobbled and chained the human mind, 

 and postponed the revelation of the future or time to 

 come by a superstitious veneration for the "old." Too 

 much faith in tradition, too much reliance on the au- 

 thority of other days, is the sickness of the schools of 

 medical science, as of all other schools whose history goes 

 into the past. The " word of the master" has always been 

 the oath, and inertia and torpidity of spirit prevailed, the 

 last ripple-mark of the advancing wave rising and harden- 

 ing into a mountain of rock, and constituting for the time 

 the horizon or visible line of union of earth and heaven. And 

 this perception brings at once the staring fact to the mind 

 that the medical science of this hour, through drowsiness 

 and inappetency, through indolence and want of courage to 

 investigate, is too grossly material in its philosophy. With 

 eye and scalpel constantly groping after material processes 



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