626 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XLV. No. 1173 



regarded as largely speculative. Such out- 

 lines are, however, suggestive of the my- 

 riads of questions that science attempts to 

 answ^er. And the answers, when found, are 

 the. means of correcting these outlines that 

 they may coincide more nearly with the 

 truth. It is to the attainment of this gen- 

 eral truth that establishments such as the 

 Scripps Institution are dedicated. May the 

 increased facilities that we celebrate to-day 

 yield an ample and worthy return. 



G. H. Parker 

 Harvard XJniversitt 



A SHORT ADDRESS TO THE GRADU- 

 ATING CLASS OF THE HARVARD 

 MEDICAL SCHOOL, 1917 



It is on occasions such as this, at certain 

 eras in the lives of young men, that we com- 

 pel them to listen to words of counsel, how- 

 ever this ultimate end of giving counsel 

 may be concealed in verbiage. Older men, 

 in which class I have been rather reluc- 

 tantly compelled to put myself, are gen- 

 erally selected to give utterance to these 

 words, from the fact that, having had a 

 wider experience, their views will have a 

 greater importance, and indeed many of 

 them and even their hearers really believe 

 this. It must be said that there is no de- 

 mand for this on your part and these ad- 

 dresses, like lectures, are forced upon you ; 

 at least I do not think you would rise up 

 and clamor for them, but you passively 

 submit. 



If one looks over the literature of ad- 

 dresses — and the sum of the published ones 

 would almost fill the Alexandrian Library 

 — there is great similarity in the matter 

 and in the form of presentation. In recent 

 years there has been some decline in at- 

 tempts at eloquence and you are no longer 

 told that medicine is a useful and noble 

 profession, with citation of examples, or 

 that you are a vessel embarking on the sea 

 of life, this associated with descriptions of 



lighthouses, cross currents, storms, etc. I 

 speak feelingly, for on looking over some 

 old addresses of mine I found that I also 

 had once spoken of ships and storms and 

 lighthouses, and I should like to humbly 

 apologize to my former auditors. 



This desire of ours to talk is partly due 

 to the garrulousness of age, which is com- 

 pelled to substitute words for action, and 

 having found how much easier the process 

 is, and how pleasant, indulges itself in the 

 vice; and partly to the persistence of an 

 utterly mistaken view of education. The 

 idea that education, that process which aims 

 at the development of the individual with 

 the view that he shall be capable of greater 

 service and of greater individual happiness, 

 can be attained by telling the aspiring stu- 

 dent things or having him study merely the 

 product that others have wrought, has un- 

 fortunately not entirely passed. If I have 

 learned anything in my now somewhat long 

 life as a teacher it is that the process of 

 education consists in giving the student op- 

 portunity, the material to study, be it man- 

 kind, books, ants or dead bodies, and in 

 every way assisting him in the study, al- 

 ways recollecting that the result must be 

 individual, the product of the material 

 which his brain has received, digested and 

 assimilated. We must not think that we 

 can give him in words merely the concep- 

 tions which we have arrived at, although 

 he may derive some profit by comparing 

 our concepts with his own. 



"We should not think that in an address 

 we can give a young man any thing of real 

 value. What we are depends upon the in- 

 dividuality of our living material and the 

 result of the action upon this of the special 

 matter which education gives plus the 

 more generalized infiuences of the environ- 

 ment. It is particularly now, when such 

 enormous changes in environmental condi- 

 tions, as compared with those under which 



