2 
INTRODUCTORY LECTURE. 
and commendable; the motives praiseworthy and noble; your 
ambition such as becomes you; and your condition full of in 
terest and sympathy. Confiding in the wisdom and experi- 
ence of those to whom the duty of providing you instructors is 
committed, you assemble at their call to listen to the accents, 
and follow the counsels; to regard the advice and drink in 
the instruction of one almost an entire stranger, whose op- 
portunities for presenting any evidence of his claims to such 
confidence have been few; and whose whole title to your at- 
tention, as yet, rests upon your regard for the opinions of your 
elders. If such be your feelings and position, and a candid 
self-examination is appealed to for the accuracy of the portrait- 
ure, are we not justified in regarding the occasion as filled 
with interest for you in its hopes and prospects, its trusts and 
responsibilities ? But, serious as are your reflections, and 
anxious as your hopes, no less are those which press upon the 
future conductor of your journey — upon him to whom so 
much of your welfare is committed. But a few short years 
have elapsed since he occupied the very ground which you 
now occupy, and listened to those principles, which it has now 
become his duty to teach. The partiality of those from whom 
he receives his commission has elevated him to this responsi- 
ble station, and invested him with a power fraught with evil 
or good, as he may employ it. The highest confidence has 
been placed in his attainments and character; and the reputa- 
tion of the College, to say nothing of his own reputation, is 
placed at stake, to be almost irretrievably blasted should he 
fail to discharge, as in duty bound, the obligations which he 
is under to it, to its representatives, and to you. Coming, 
then, before you for the first time in his new obligations to 
you and the College, deeply impressed with the value of the 
trust which has been put in him, subjected to the scrutiny and 
comparison which invariably attend the inauguration of a 
new teacher, and entertaining no exalted estimate of his 
his attainments, can he be otherwise than sensibly affected by 
the peculiarity of his position, and the arrival of that period 
which is to witness his induction into this chair as the Profes- 
sor of Chemistry in the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy — a 
