Hospitals, Medical Science, and Public Health.
Gentlemen,—It is one of the noble attributes of the human mind never to rest contented with an achievement, be it never so useful, never so glorious. The old Manchester Infirmary, which happily escaped the division so injurious to some other city hospitals, was as famous in its great physicians and surgeons, and in its generous and enlightened benefactors, as in form it was stately and in its history monumental. Yet the mind of your citizens, thankful as they have been for a great past, would not rest contented on form and history; gazing still insatiably into the future, contemplating the new scope and potencies of modern medicine, personal and national, reading the principles on which this progress had been, and is being, made, and the signals of these ever- widening ranges of knowledge, power, and beneficence, Manchester men, in alliance with their University, are inspired to build yet more stately, to endow more richly, and thus to organise that still vaster compass of charity, of learning, and of municipal and national efficiency which I have visited, and to which I have the great honour of bearing witness, to-day. Thankful, nevertheless, as I have said, for a great past; but while these words are passing my lips the most ardent pilgrim will pause for a moment as, in the visions of his memory, are reflected the figures of those strong companions who lately were breasting the hill with us, but whose hands are now dropped, and whose familiar and prophetic voices are fallen into silence. Manchester and Manchester University, even after the loss of such men as Leech, Dreschfeld, Harris, Ashby, Cullingworth, Jones, Collier, will be more and more; notwithstanding we are haunted by the pathos of human life and death wherein they, who of all of us knew best how to rejoice in these new hopes and new promises, have been taken from us; and we are left to rejoice, if by no means alone, yet without their wise counsels,
