Page:The Harveian oration (electronic resource) - delivered at the Royal College of Physicians, October 18th, 1886 (IA b2041190x).pdf/21

 17 can be in the present age bestowed is such as I have had to commemorate to-day-one that con- fers upon the College the power of contributing towards making us, through the acquisition of increased knowledge, more efficient agents in the exercise of our calling.

The next part of my duty is to exhort the Fellows and Members of this College "to search and study out the secrets of nature by way of experiment." These are the directions I am to follow, and they give me a wide field to select a course of procedure from. The kind of exhorta- tion I shall employ will consist in placing before you a view of the method of work which IIarvey himself adopted, and then, as an incentive to follow his example, I will display some of the fruit yielded by recent research conducted upon the lines of his procedure.

The object to be promoted is the acquirement of additional knowledge. It is an old but true saying that knowledge is power. We accept the doctrine which comes to us in definite shape from no less ancient an authority than Aristotle, that there is