Page:Transactions of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia (ser 03 vol 05).djvu/35



I accepted with great diffidence your appointment to prepare for the College a memoir of its late President. He was no ordinary man. Like the future king of Israel, he was pre-eminent among his brethren. Few of them have attained to the height of his moral and intellectual stature; and fewer still have equalled him in the variety and extent of his professional knowledge and achievements. His long, useful and laborious life is a bright example, and contains much of encouragement and instruction. It was this lofty excellence that made me hesitate. I feared that the subject would be injured by my feeble treatment; I knew that I could not even realize my own ideal; and I should have been pleased if choice had been made of a Fellow more competent to do it justice. But since it has been otherwise ordered, I address myself with loving heart, though weak endeavor, to the performance of the grateful duty which you have enjoined.