And what amount of exertion, and what degree and character of talents, are necessary to secure the prizes which it is prepared to bestow?

These inquiries are natural and proper, and have doubtless occurred to your minds and been duly pondered. The step which you have taken in commencing your present studies would seem to indicate that your researches have received a satisfactory answer. You have ascertained, I suppose, that the business of physicians is not wholly without merit as a remunerative or lucrative pursuit; and that your future professional labours, to whatever other evils they may leave you exposed, will at least secure you against the pressure of those pecuniary distresses which so many learned scholars have experienced, and which many of them have so earnestly and eloquently lamented.

Such expectations may be justly entertained. They are sanctioned by the general experience of those who have gone before you. It is undoubtedly true of your profession, that in no other vocation are capacity, knowledge, and industry more certain to find an adequate reward.

But it behooves you to be on your guard against the error, so common among the young, of cherishing over-sanguine and unreasonable hopes. It is best that in this, as in all other respects, you should see

your profession in the light of truth and reality, and should know at once that, generally speaking, it is not a pursuit that leads to wealth. You might easily find a more profitable field for the exercise of your talents.

Yet if you look around upon the various occupations of mankind, especially upon those which are considered most favourable for the acquisition of riches, a calm examination will show you that many of them labour under certain grave disadvantages which materially diminish the force of their attractions, and might well cause you to pause before you adopt them as your business for life.

Thus, from the useful and reputable labours and ventures of Commerce you might derive far greater affluence than it is at all probable you will ever acquire from the practice of Medicine. But prudence will point out to you the uncertainties and perils which infest this walk of life as constituting formidable objections to its selection.

There are other pursuits and occupations, well reputed, not unprofitable, and in which good and respectable men are engaged, which you might notwithstanding be unwilling to embrace; which you might justly object to, as being incompatible with mental culture and with the prosecution of those intellectual studies and inquiries on which depend some of the

greatest and most lasting pleasures of rational exis

tence.

There are also other kinds of business, extremely profitable, which I think you would avoid and reject from higher and more important considerations. For at your age, when the "shades of the prison-house " have not yet darkened your minds, and when the lions of the den in which you are cast have not yet gotten the mastery over you, you doubtless understand and believe what at a later period so many forget, that for riches it is both possible and common to pay far too high a price.

Aristotle has given many wise precepts respecting the duty and the means of acquiring and preserving wealth; but these precepts are followed and illustrated by numerous cases in which this object was accomplished by methods which the astute philosophers who pursue their business in Wall street would entitle sharp practice, and which all the rest of mankind would call unqualified knavery.*

And this sharp practice, to use the milder term, is resorted to by multitudes who never heard the name of the mighty Stagirite, but who may boast that in this respect they are more sturdy Aristotelians than Aristotle

* Economics, B. 1. C. 6. & B. 2. C. 2—42.

himself, and that, like Bacon, they have gone far beyond the narrow limits of the Peripatetic philosophy. It would be easy to point out illustrations of this truth. They are conspicuous on every side. The pursuits in which you see your compatriots engaged are many of them of a nature to which you can scarcely incline, unless your minds are more liberated than I think they are from certain antiquated prejudices on the subject of honesty and honour; pursuits in which wealth, the doubtful good which they promise, is more than balanced by the weighty and inevitable evils which they bring, by the dangers, the criminality, the shame, the infamy which attend them.

The profession which you have embraced offers (thank God !) no opportunities for the sudden acquisition of wealth without the rendering of equivalent services to the community. Yet it possesses many advantages even as a means of obtaining a livelihood and securing pecuniary independence. The prizes which it bestows are less brilliant than those which are gained in some other pursuits; but they are more numerous and more certain, and may be sought with but little hazard to moral rectitude, and won without obloquy, and without injury to others.

But I trust and am sure, it is not this consideration alone which has attached you to your profession.

That profession presents higher and nobler claims; claims on your affection and reverence; claims founded on the character of its quiet studies and its active labours; attractive and delightful studies, directed to the investigation of the most wonderful of God's works in this world—the human body and the human mind; beneficent labours, devoted to the carrying of health and safety, or of solace and relief, to the afflicted and miserable among our fellow-men. When we consider what our profession is, what it has done, what it is hourly doing for the benefit of mankind, we shall hear with but small regard the opinions of those who estimate all pursuits merely by the gain which they bring, and depreciate our calling as a poor, ill-paid and unprofitable business. Devote yourselves to the duties of your profession, live as becomes the faithful and zealous disciples of science, and you may turn away with contempt, or at least with pity, from the paltry wisdom of such philosophers.

It was a proverb in former times in relation to the respective prospects of lawyers and physicians, that Galen bestows wealth and Justinian confers honoursGalenus dat opes, Justinianus honores. This adage, if still true, is, like most other attempts to express in a few words the results of long observation and experience, true only in a restricted and qualified sense.