Page:Introductory Lecture 109 Medical Department University of Pennsylvania Stille.djvu/3



is a custom as universal as civilization to celebrate a new era in the history of a public institution, by assembling its friends together to rejoice with one another and unite in wishing it prosperity. It has fallen to my lot to-day to represent the Medical Faculty of the University in the dedication of its new Hall, and in their name and behalf to offer you an earnest and hearty welcome. Honor to the government of the University, and gratitude to its benefactors, that we are enabled to exhibit to you a building so noble in its proportions and complete in its appointments! I extend a cordial welcome to the young gentlemen who have come from so many and distant places to form our medical family. May I succeed in animating them with a love for their studies, and courage and perseverance in pursuing them! Let me hope to prevent them from wasting their time and strength in an ill-judged method of acquiring knowledge. The longer one teaches medicine the better acquainted does he become with the inherent difficulties of the subject, and the more deeply impressed with the grave responsibility which rests upon those who teach and on those who learn it. I shall, therefore, perhaps be pardoned for the practical character of my discourse, and for its barrenness of those rhetorical flowers which might have seemed more appropriate to a day of jubilee like the present.

The life of man may be measured by the years of a generation, or by the threescore years and ten which form the ordinary term of longevity. Animal life is limited by organic laws. A few years sooner, a few years later, it exhales into the unknown, and the organism it informed