medical degrees in the University of London, when I was first an
examiner there twenty years ago; and quite as much knowledge as is
possessed by the ordinary student of medicine at the present day. I am
justified, therefore, in looking forward to the time when the student
who proposes to devote himself to medicine will come, not absolutely
raw and inexperienced as he is at present, but in a certain state of
preparation for further study; and I look to the university to help him
still further forward in that stage of preparation, through the
organisation of its biological department. Here the student will find
means of acquainting himself with the phenomena of life in their
broadest acceptation. He will study not botany and zoology, which, as I
have said, would take him too far away from his ultimate goal; but, by
duly arranged instruction, combined with work in the laboratory upon
the leading types of animal and vegetable life, he will lay a broad,
and at the same time solid, foundation of biological knowledge; he will
come to his medical studies with a comprehension of the great truths of
morphology and of physiology, with his hands trained to dissect and his
eyes taught to see. I have no hesitation in saying that such
preparation is worth a full year added on to the medical curriculum. In
other words, it will set free that much time for attention to those
studies which bear directly upon the student's most grave and serious
duties as a medical practitioner.

Up to this point I have considered only the teaching aspect of your
great foundation, that function of the university in virtue of which it
plays the part of a reservoir of ascertained truth, so far as our
symbols can ever interpret nature. All can learn; all can drink of this
lake. It is given to few to add to the store of knowledge, to strike
new springs of thought, or to shape new forms of beauty. But so sure as
it is that men live not by bread, but by ideas, so sure is it that the