Page:The Hunterian Oration 1839.djvu/28

THE HUNTERIAN ORATION. 21 And here, I yenture the expression of an opinion, that at the present period, the adoption among ourselves, of the system of the French Academy, would much conduce to the benefit of surgery. Not that we need the incitement to the study of science which, it may be imagined, was intended for the ancient philosophers, by Cimon, who decorated with fountains and verdant groves, the first building in Athens appropriated to the purposes of science, under the name of Academia. For ourselves, it is only to be desired to establish a spirit of union for the object we are striving individually to attain, and, as flowing from this, the ready means of generalizing and comparing the facts we are constantly observing. We want not for the advance of surgery, the multiplication of facts, so much as the right appreciation of the abundance of them already accumulated in our literary storehouses, the published works of our day. Alike to this, has been, I presume, the feeling with which some of our medical philosophers have introduced into medicine, a new instrument, wherewith to work, in enucleating from the mass of details, general results, the calculation by numbers simply, as a means of working out the problems of medicine with a precision and certainty corresponding with the predictions of astronomy, the axioms of arithmetic and geometry, and so to institute a calculus of probabilities for medicine. But the phenomena with which we have to deal, fugitive in their nature, always �