Page:Introductory Lecture 109 Medical Department University of Pennsylvania Stille.djvu/5

 lacked the hand to support and guide it, as well as to guard it from outward harm.

In whatever institution the forces which move it are duly co-ordinated and balanced, the most perfect results are obtained; whenever they are wanting, the results are apt to be irresolution in council, unsteadiness of action, immaturity of production, and an ephemeral existence. It has been admirably said that “the secret of free movement in the universe is equipoise.” Every normal act in the physical and in the vital domain, and not less in the moral world, is the result of a balance of power. The planets revolve around the sun in virtue of the counterpoise of gravity and the centrifugal force; life, as Bichat expressed it, is the sum of the powers that resist death; the social system is the equilibrium between barbarism and civilization. Just as certainly is the most perfect system of laws, the wisest administration of public affairs, the most efficient method of education—not that which is instrinsicallyintrinsically [sic] the best, but that which is in most perfect harmony with the condition of the people where it exists.

To thoughts like these the mind seems naturally led by the events of this day, in which we are assembled to inaugurate the new building of the Medical Department of the University of Pennsylvania. Who that is acquainted with the humble lodging which first sheltered its ambitious Faculty, could recognize in it the primal idea of the palace in which we are now assembled? Or who could discern in the modest means at their command for illustration, the germ of the unrivalled museum and apparatus which now complete through the senses the education of the mind? Or who that does not know the brief duration of the lecture-term of those days, the scanty materials for instruction which then existed either in books or in the personal experience of the professors, the really embryo condition of medical science at that time, can realize that now in every branch of medicine the teacher is absolutely encumbered by the vastness of the material he is obliged to prepare for his pupils, and constantly forced to regret that the duration of the courses has not been increased so as to correspond