Page:The Medical School of the Melbourne University - an address delivered on the twenty fifth anniversary of the opening of the Medical School, in the Wilson Hall, March 23, 1887 (IA b22293346).pdf/10

10 Government, Mr. Service, asking for a special Government-grant for enlarging the buildings of the School. And I am pleased to record that the Premier met the deputation in an encouraging manner, nor did he limit himself to the manner of dealing with the application, but promised, and subsequently performed his promise, to get £10,000 voted for the proposed new buildings. To this sum other amounts have since been added, and it is believed that more will be forthcoming when asked for. As a result of this liberal recognition of the needs of the School, very large additions have been made to our buildings. The style of architecture is wholly different from that of the original structure, for while this latter is of the spurious classic order, and as I have already said, in brick and stucco, the new portion is of respectable Elizabethan Gothic, and the material is good honest freestone. The inside arrangements are not less satisfactory. There is a dissecting room, with ancillary offices that could not be bettered in any school in the world. There are large museums for anatomical and pathological specimens, a commodious new theatre, and several other apartments, each one having its own particular use; but the building is by no means finished. It shows an architectural raw stump on its eastern side, and the western façade has yet to be blended with the original building, whose poverty-stricken stucco wall ought to be effaced. The old building has also undergone some modifications. A few years ago a chemical laboratory for the students was added, and now the dissecting room has been transformed into a physiological laboratory; the chemical theatre is being enlarged, the old museum is shortly to be turned into a library, and the room hitherto used as a library is to be allotted to the students as a common room. This room, I may say, is all too small for this purpose, but as, up to the present, the medical students have had no room at all—a grave neglect, I take it—they will be, at least, a little better off than they have been. And concerning the library of the Medical School, something has to be said. It was brought out by Professor Halford nearly twenty-five years ago, and it remains numerically very much as it was then. Very few additions have been made to it, the Council having, until recently, displayed a persistent parsimony towards both it and everything else connected with the Medical School. But now, the library is to make a new departure. The