THE HUNTERIAN ORATION. 7
sures within our museum, entrusted to us by Parliamentary enactment; where, moreover, we have the opportunity of shewing that the advance of surgery is commensurate with the intellectual activity characteristic of our age. In the enlargement of our build- ing, now comprising a museum adequate to the effective display of its contents, a library more complete in the literature of medicine and its collateral sciences than any other in Britain, also in the publication now actively advancing, of the explanatory and illustrated catalogues of the contents of the museum, with, besides, an extended series of Lectures annually delivered on comparative Anatomy and Physiology ; in all these arrangements we have earnestly endeavoured to meet the just expectations of the profession, and thus to respond to the enquiry, whether we are rightly fulfilling the trust consigned to us for the advance of medicine and surgery, and thereby for the benefit of the community.
History, in respect to medicine, has fulfilled its purposes—it satisfies the curiosity which men naturally feel with reference to the occupation of their lives, to know the events of past time, and who were the principal persons engaged in them; it gratifies the pleasure which men experience in comparing the operations of their own minds with the reflections of men who were, in distant ages, engaged in the same subjects of research as themselyes. Nor are the records of medi- �
