INTRODUCTORY LECTURE. 
321 
conducting successfully those complex and delicate processes 
which are essential to accurate analysis, especially of organic 
products. This part of the investigation may, therefore, with 
propriety be left to the pharmaceutical chemist, within whose 
province it strictly falls. 
To complete your work it will now only remain to record 
the results of your investigations. In doing this, your rule 
should be to put down everything exactly, plainly, and in as 
few words as possible consistently with perfect clearness. 
Your object will not be to produce an impression by means of 
rhetoric, but to establish facts in science: and these are always 
most striking in their native simplicity. We suspect the 
purity of truth herself, when she is disguised in meretricious 
ornament. You should endeavor in your narrative to present 
to the reader, in their proper order, all the materials for form- 
ing a judgment of which you may be yourselves in possession, 
and thus enable him to come to the conclusion you desire, per- 
fectly satisfied of its correctness. No matter whether your 
inquiries have ended in the discovery of some new fact, or the 
refutation of some old error; in either case the result is truth, 
and the process by which it was attained is equally deserving 
of record. But be not in haste to publish your essay after you 
have prepared it. An author is seldom a good judge of his 
own productions when immediately from his pen. He views 
his offspring with a paternal, I might, perhaps, be allowed to 
say, with a maternal eye, which can see no defects, and often 
finds beauties when indifference would discover only deform- 
ity. Lay aside your manuscript for a time; let the ardor of 
composition cool, the pains of your mental labor be forgotten; 
you will then be able to judge of your own production more 
as a critic than as an author; and you may depend upon it that 
you will find much to amend, and rejoice that you have yet the 
power. 
I have thus, gentlemen, accomplished the object which I 
proposed at the beginning of the Lecture. Much more might 
have been said on almost every point, and perhaps not un- 
VOL. vi. — NO, iv. 41 
