bearing rich and wholesome fruits for man's mental and physical improvement, attest the spirit of the age.

In theology, medicine and the collateral sciences, their respective advocates are pushing investigation into the very arcana of hidden law, eliciting new doctrines that are continually augmenting the domain of human thought and intelligence. The earth is ransacked to discover the missing links between man and the monad. Chemistry, with its potent crucible, is evoked, to circumvent the normal processes of metamorphose, to transmute baser materials into gold, and the blackened carbon into the flashing diamond.

The theories of Evolution and Evangelism, Darwinism and Deism have never before been so strongly discussed by their respective champions.

The satirical casuistry of Hume, the fiery pages of Paine, the trenchant arguments of Draper, the earnest and forcible reasoning of Strauss, the logical deductions of Tyndall, Procter and Huxley are developing doctrines that require the ablest efforts of theologians to successfully controvert.

The light of science is pouring upon us a continuous stream of effulgence, lighting up the dark caverns of our superstitious natures, and illuminating them with the clear sunbeam of intelligence.

Look at science to-day, and see how she has cleared up the mental pathway to a better knowledge of our little cosmos.

The astronomer has turned his telescope upon the adamantine firmament, and it has dissolved into thin air. The total solid particles that the blue expanse contains, as estimated by Tyndall, might be carefully packed in a lady's reticule. The glittering sparks that gemmed its surface have expanded into enormous suns, thousands of times larger than our own globe. The circumscribed heaven of the Apocalypse, twelve thousand furlongs broad, has grandly opened into an immensity of space, placing our little planet so far from the nearest fixed star that a locomotive engine, at its highest speed, could not reach it in seven hundred thousand centuries.

Our earth, from being the grand immovable planet, to which the sun and stars were mere decorations, has dwindled into the

insignificance of the smallest pellet, and dislodged from its fixed centre, is sent whirling in its circuit, as a tiny satellite in the train of a central body; itself one of two hundred million suns, flying with its planetary fleet, within its own orbit, with incalculable velocity, around some larger centre.

Physicists have developed the acceptable theory that instead of a fall of the human race, and increasing ruin in the world, man has gradually climbed upwards in civilization, from cave habitations and rude habiliments of leaves and skins, to the high grade of civilization in our present epoch.

The nearer we approach prehistoric man, the more clearly do we perceive by cumulative evidence, thus far unimpeached, that the race has developed into its present condition from the lowest forms of barbarism. The men who fashioned the rude weapons and tools dug up in the peat-bogs of Ireland, the sand-pits of France, were only a little removed from the brutes among whom they dwelt. Possessing the human form and endowed with the simplest of the human faculties, these distinctive characteristics were all that divided them from the animal. Emerging from this humble estate, man has imperceptibly and continuously progressed, never retrograded. The result of unvarying laws operating upon material organism growing more and more refined, will increase and develop man's capacity for improvement; and we see in the struggles of the past and the triumphs of the present the pledges of a grander, nobler and more Godlike future.

Every dark corner of the earth, and strange event in the heavens, the habitations of "the great floods" have been explored and scrutinized. The monsters of the deep and mammoths of the jungle have been taken into captivity and trained to the submission of human intellect and direction. The pathway of the comet has been foretold. The cause of the earthquake has been revealed. Spectres have proved to be no more than mental illusions; lunacy has been traced to cerebral affections, disease to its various causes and antidotes scientifically administered. Law, immutable law, without the slightest slip or variation, reigns everywhere. Lily and solar system unfold in obedience to one and the same formula. Similia and gravitation respond to the same great and unchanging principle. The tiny

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match carried in our vest pocket, ready to leap into flame at a moment's attrition, has exorcised the fire deity, no more to be appeased by the sacrifice of our firstborn. The lightning imprisoned for man's uses is no longer revered as the bolt of Jove. Science has mined in caverns and unearthed the implements and weapons of man among the mouldering bones of mammoths. It has delved amid the deep-buried and long-forgotten treasures of ancient cities, and unearthed from the tombs of past centuries the connecting links of historic ages.

The statue of Marcus Aurelius, the Roman Emperor, has been vivified from its mouldy grave of eighteen centuries; the temple of Zeus at Olympia, and the famous colossal statue of that god, by the illustrious Phidias (the sculptor's masterpiece of workmanship), has been discovered; a rich legacy to science, as showing the comprehensive grandeur of Grecian art in the early period of the earth's history, and connecting the nineteenth century with the beginning of the Christian era.

The tomb of Agamemnon, at the acropolis of Mycenae, has been unearthed by the untiring energies of the great moderndiscoverer Schliemann, who proves that the cultivated poems of Homer, and especially the Iliad, that sings of the siege of Troy and the chivalrous deeds of this Grecian king and warrior, no longer exist in the uncertain fields of tradition, but are living historic facts, of inestimable value to the accumulated knowledge. of the nineteenth century. Science has deciphered hieroglyphics, and found arts and history venerable even before commentators fixed the date of Adam's creation. It has assigned the formation of the vast beds of chalk and limestone, miles in breadth, to the manufacture of microscopic organisms. It has shown how the planet we occupy, correlated from a fiery cloud to a molten sphere, formed the external crust that now suspends us above the burning furnace raging within.

Amid all these grand, brilliant and sublime achievements in the realms of science, I would ask what has this boasted and enlightened civilization effected comparatively for man himself,

"In form and apprehension how like a God," for the tenement of that proud and mightly intellect?

The casket of his genius and wisdom has mouldered away with other unnumbered millions who have inhabited this earth, and the only codicil left to the living strugglers for honor and fame is the sad and gloomy thought that he never turned investigation inward unto himself, but untimely perished through neglect or ignorance of those very laws that most interest his being.

How grandly impressive are the words of the philosophic Bacon, and how cogently they strike home to us, the medical progressives of the nineteenth century: "If by gaining knowledge," he says, "we destroy our health, we labor for a thing that will be useless in our hands; he that sinks his vessel by overloading it, though it be with gold and silver and precious stones, will give its owner but an ill account of his voyage."

Most of you, doubtless, have witnessed the painful spectacle of the student, who with the glow of ambition and feverish hectic struggling together on his manly cheek, still pursues his mental labors without regard to the laws of health. As he toils onward, bearing the promise of rich discoveries for human happiness, the chaplet of honor almost encircling his noble brow, he awakes to the awful revelation that the mortal worm is gnawing at his heart before the bud begins to wither, and he is lost, irretrievably lost, beyond the power of medical restitution.

This is no overwrought picture of the ideal brain, and the daily diaries of our practitioners of medicine, if rightly interpreted, prove that notwithstanding the great good that has been accomplished for suffering humanity when prostrated with sickness, too little has been accomplished to prevent "the various ills that flesh is heir to." As practitioners of this high art, as conservators of the public health, are we not more or less responsible for these daily sacrifices of life and health?

We have, praised without stint the unsparing study that burns "the midnight oil;" our literature is teeming with the meed of honor that attaches to genius, that peculiar erratic outgrowth of mento-physical infirmity; and is it not strange that of the number of geniuses to which almost every village periodically gives birth, so few of these eccentrics are to be found? All along the shores of the great ocean of life, on whose current we

are borne with resistless sweep, are strewn the wrecks of those whose embarkation was accomplished under the most hopeful and buoyant auspices.

We laud in glowing numbers the pale face and attenuated body, withering under a preternatural activity of mind; we have associated "muscle with rowdyism; glowing cheeks with inebriety; long-windedness with profanity," and broad shoulders with a lack of intellectual receptivity.

Thanks to that brave and heroic band of educational reformers who have stemmed this sweeping tide of popular error, and saved the thoughtless student from the inevitable destruction attendant upon excessive mental work without its compensating physical exercise, the cloud of poesy and ethereal vapor that enveloped the subject of intellectual paleness and physical innervation is passing away, and we are now beginning to respect the rights of the body as well as those of the mind.

We are fast finding out that the pale sickly student may win the most prizes in college, but the tough brawny one bears off the most prizes in life. "In every calling," says a distinguished author, "other things being equal, the most successful man will be the one who has slept the longest and digested the most dinners with the least difficulty."

This incessant overtaxing of the mind, and consequent impairment of the body, and the long row of vials and bottles filled with the tonics and stimulants of old physic to strengthen the weakened forces, are not only contrary to nature but are injurious and destructive to the physical man.

Every student that would accomplish good brainwork demands a constitution adequate to the labor imposed upon him. Sir Robert Peel, Palmerston, Brougham, and Gladstone, of England; Bismarck and Stahl, of Germany; Webster, Clay, Calhoun and Benton, of America, all great political leaders and prodigions workers at the bar and in the Senate, have been men of capacious organizations, who trained their bodies as sedulously

they did their intellects. It is significant, also, that the great physicist, John Tyndall, habituated himself to athletic games. He was an excellent swimmer, runner, climber, and no dull student at boxing, and I have no doubt that if the manly