Page:An Examination of Certain Charges - Alfred Stillé.djvu/14

 in attendance, it is not our intention to deny, but we do emphatically deny, that by such acts a tithe of that interruption was caused, once so uniform and annoying, by gentlemen in constant motion to and from the lecture room, some entering for amusement, and others retiring, fatigued with a display of learning, the object of which they were altogether unable to appreciate.

January 6th at length arrived, when it was expected the Board of Trustees would at their stated meeting receive the report of their committee. The nature of that report may be easily surmised from the passage of the following resolution, that it is expedient that the chair of Materia Medica be vacated. This it was generally understood was adopted as the most delicate method of evincing the will of the Board, and in that light is an act highly honourable to the body from which it emanated. It afforded an opportunity to withdraw from a situation it was plain the Professor could not very long retain, without subjecting his feelings to unnecessary mortification. It could not have been by him considered as other than a harbinger of harsher measures; but his actions held a different language, and with wonted regularity he appeared, to perform the duties of his office. The class, impressed with the belief just stated, pursued their accustomed occupations, looking forward however, to the following Tuesday, as the time appointed by the Trustees for a final action on the case. During the week which intervened between the 6th and 13th insts., it is proven that Dr. Coxe declared more than once, that he would cease to lecture as soon as the Trustees had taken action upon the memorial. Such declarations, backed by the impression that on the said 13th the Board would act finally, inspired all with the hope and belief, that after that date, the source of so much anxiety and unpleasant feeling would become extinct.

And here it becomes the disagreeable duty of the committee to expose in the publication of 'a Physician' a gross and palpable misrepresentation. He holds the following language: "A meeting of the Trustees having been held on the 6th January, and its having been expected that the Professor would most certainly have been dismissed from his office, on that occasion by the Government of the Institution, such being the determination of the pupils. When the students on the following morning were informed that the Board could not act on their memorial without a violation of the regulations of the University, except at a meeting specially summoned for the occasion—which meeting had been summoned for the following Tuesday, the Memorialists lost all patience, a meeting was instantly got up, and it was determined that the students should themselves, the following morning, compel the Professor to discontinue his lectures." Assurance is the twin-brother of Ignorance; and were it not for the knowledge of this base alliance, the committee would in vain attempt a solution of the passage just quoted. With this knowledge, it is easy to conceive, that on a premise so entirely gratuitous, a fiction, purely of the imagination, might be substituted as a fact. 'A Physician' appears totally unaware that from the 16th December, to 6th January, a committee of the Trustees had examined all the merits of the case, and that it was on that 16th December, the meeting was held, specially summoned for the occasion, and that on the 6th