profession will teach you better. The criminal law has vastly changed since men were hanged for petty theft, and equally great changes have taken place in what, I believe, are called equity proceedings, changes which I imagine would be to the men of the time of Coke and Blackstone, difficult to comprehend.

When our senatorial author was writing his essay matters were looming large on the horizon in governmental and administrative affairs which then, and still, require the most intelligent and thoughtful action of our law makers, which when brought before our courts for decision, will find few precedents in the past to guide those required to pass upon them. Our colonial possessions in the far east, and those nearer at hand, the control and regulation of large aggregations of capital, the new and complicated problems in commercial law, and in the regulation of traffic, present to you gentlemen, matters which may well engage your attention which must convince any one that matters of jurisprudence still remain which the men and courts of the past and present have not even touched upon.

Some one among you may yet do for the United States and for her new and as yet unassimilated citizens, I canot call them subjects, what Lord Cromer has done for England, and in a wider and better sense, for Egypt. From the law department of this university may yet be sent out, possibly he sits before me, some American Turgot who shall do for America what that great financial minister of Louis XVI, whose writings on finance, jurisprudence, politics in the broadest sense, taxation, philosophy and I know not what more, may well be studied today, did for France. It is of particular interest to us that this great man predicted, a quarter of a century before it took place, the inevitable separation of the American Colonies from Great Britian, if the Mother Country persisted in her course toward them, and that he pointed out to Spain the folly of the course she was pursuing toward her insular possession in the East and West Indies, a course, which doggedly followed, led, as he predicted, to their loss.

Our financiers, our doctors of the tariff, our tax regulators, have much to learn from this great man, and some of you may, by the application of his wise teaching and of the principles which have here been taught you, bring order out of what now seems to many of us almost chaos.

I have had the fortune, or misfortune, to have been in many courts, to have followed many trials and listened to many and and varied decisions. If, gentlemen, there is one thing more than another which I have carried away from those experiences, it is a sense of the dependence which you men of the law place on tradition and precedent, the difficulty you experience in getting

away from them in adapting your ideas and your rulings to the changing, broader and better views of the times. Trammelled. by precedent or impeded by the lack of precedent, law has seldom led in medical or sanitary reforms, and rarely followed, except at great distance and with halting steps. I say this with much deference, and with a full appreciation that I am by no means prepared to prove my assertion, but this is what has impressed me. I may be wrong, it is possible that I am not however telling you anything which you have not yourselves discovered. It has been naturally in matters medical that I have been most concerned, and upon which my observations are based.

meanor.

There is one word in the language pertaining to matters with which much of my life work has been concerned, with which consciously or unconsciously you and the courts have constantly to deal. It has to do with every contract of whatever sort, with every suit at law, with every defence made for crime or misdeThat word is "insanity." In the disposition of property by will, deed of trust, or other conveyance, the question is always pertinent, though happily not always of necessity raised, "is or was the person conveying this property of sound and disposing mind and memory?" The integral parts of the body politic. the families, are just as much under its dominating influence; questions of marriage, the continuation of family relations, the severance of the marriage tie, the descent of property, are all modified in more instances than is generally known by this one word "insanity." The fate of dynastics and nations has been governed by it, and pages of history stand today which would read very differently had not insanity placed its finger on some ruler or his minister and changed everything. What effect for instance had the insanity of Chatham in preventing the conciliation of the American Colonies, whose friend he was; what more serious effect the attacks of madness of George III, destined to end his days in hopeless fatuity, blind and demented.?

You will agree with me, I think, gentlemen, as to the importance of this word, referring as it does to a disturbance of those regular, orderly, methodical mental operations essential to the proper conduct of the affairs of men and nations. To you here in New York it is a word of grave import. Within your borders, supported by public taxation, involving the expenditure annually of more than $6,000,000 you have in your well equipped and excellently conducted State Hospitals in round numbers 25,000 insane. Of the more than 80,000 admitted to those hospitals since October 1, 1888, more than 50% were of foreign birth. You are somewhat unfortunately situated in that the larger proportion of immigrants land in New York City and a considerable proportion (in

1904 over 30%, or more than 260,000) remain within your borders. What proportion of these are destined to become public charges in your almshouses, prisons and State Hospitals no one can say, but the number will be sufficiently large to warrant your thoughtful attention. I am wandering a little from what I proposed to say, but in doing so I have but enlarged the scope and importance of the subject. I ventured, somewhat rashly perhaps, to criticise the application of the law to questions medical. In the famous and now historical McNaughten case, in 1843, twelve judges in England submitted answers put to them by the House of Lords on the question of responsibility, and from that day to this, with few exceptions, the knowledge of right and wrong as to the act involved, on the part of the prisoner, has been the test of responsibility for criminal or other acts. This is not the time nor is it the place to discuss the matters here involved, but I submit to you young gentlemen this broad problem of the responsibility of the insane, involving many and intricate points of jurisprudence and of medico-psychology, and urge upon you the importance of its solution.

The difficulty which confronts the bench and the bar when met by this and similar problems are not far to seek. It would not be fair to ask you to be expert in medicine, whether involving questions of mental responsibility, or less important and difficult ones, but it is not, I think, asking too much of your teachers to give some instruction, or cause some to be given, to you and those who follow you, in accordance with modern ideas of mental pathology. First at Heidelberg, now in Munich, Kraepelin, the man who has done more probably than any other one man of his time to clarify and change our conception of diseases of the brain, has been giving a regular course of lectures on Forensic Psychiatry with practical demonstrations taken from the wards of his clinic, and these lectures are eagerly followed by judges and attorneys, to their profit, the benefit of their clients, and the enlightenment of the law.

You have not far to search, you see, to find matters medical which may well engage your attention, and conjoined with these and cognate to them are important subjects relating to the regulation and restriction of immigration which must engage the carnest attention of the best minds if we are to control in any measure conditions which are now injecting into the blood of the nation additional sources of pauperism, crime and disease, and imposing upon us additional burdens of taxation.

The burden of these problems is upon your shoulders, young men, and upon those of your asociates in the law. It rests there because you are supposed to be learned in the law, and able out of

its provisions to apply old enactments, or devise new ones, which shall serve for their solution. You cannot, gentlemen, in your future work, like Numa, gain inspiration at the fountain of Egeria, nor may you solve your difficulties, as did Lycurgus, by consulting the Pythian oracle. You must be guided by the principles of law as announced and defined by the courts, and by the statutes enacted by various legislative bodies, under constitutional restrictions.

To the duty of each hour and each day you must bring the best that is in you of mind and heart. Honesty of purpose and act, justice in dealing with all men must, to ensure success and respect, be your guides. Before you enter upon the practice of your profession you must take a solemn oath to support and defend the Constitution of your State and of the United States. This is the highest civic duty which any man can be called upon to assume. No more important, no more sacred calling, could be yours. The higher interpretation which you put upon that call, the greater zeal which you show in answering it, the more diligence which you exhibit in perfecting yourselves for the best service to your profession and your country, the more assured will be your success, and as you succeed, as you make your mark upon the history of your times, you will reflect glory upon your Alma Mater.

What can I say, my fellow physicians, to you, and what to these others so nearly related to you in their professional work of pharmacy and dentistry, in the few moments which yet remain to me? Some of the matters which I have urged upon your fellow students of the law school apply as well to you, and you must bear your part in bringing them to a satisfactory and wise solution.

In anatomy

You, I am sure, have no complacent notion that medicine has about reached the mountain top. You realise, I believe, that the. problems in medical science yet to be solved, notwithstanding the marvelous strides which have been made in the last quarter of a century, afford as great opportunities to the student and investigator as did those which confronted our ancestors. there are yet unexplored fields, and this is especially true of the anatomy of the nervous system. It follows as a natural corollary that equal opportunities lie before the student of physiology. Chemistry and especially physiological chemistry affords ample scope for the most enthusiastic and energetic student, and from researches in that department we may expect, judging by the past, to achieve results which shall demonstrate the causes of many obscure diseases and add to the resources of materia-medica or enlarge and make more accurate our knowledge of the action of drugs now in use. In surgery, within the memory of men still at work in their profession, anesthesia has robbed the operating room

of its terrors and wonderfully broadened surgical possibilities. Asepsis and antisepsis are of such recent application that there are many within the sound of my voice who recall the work of Pasteur and the application of his discoveries by Lister and the still more recent studies of many men in bacteriology, with the gradual development of surgical technique of the present day.

Who shall say, however, that either anesthesia or asepsis is not yet susceptible of being made more safe and easy of application on the one hand, or more certain on the other. Fellow students of medicine, for you are yet students and must so continue, in the history of the world many names connected with our profession are "writ large" on its pages. Hippocrates of Cos, whose oath of office you have taken today, Galen and Celsus, Harvey and Sydenham, Ambroisé Paré, and Louis and Laennec, Claude Bernard, Pinel, and Esquirol his pupil, Rush, the Warrens. Jenner and Lister and, in more recent times, and nearer home, to pass over a long line of men who wrought valiantly, the Flints. Dalton, Hamilton, Moore and Miner, White and Rochester here in Buffalo, accomplished for medicine and surgery things the fruits of which we are now reaping.

It is at infrequent and irregular intervals that a Jenner or a Lister, a Pasteur, a Virchow, or a Koch rises to the height of true leadership in medicine, and leaves his impress upon his times and his profession. The future holds as many opportunities for some one or more of you to reach this exalted and enviable position as it did for those who have gone before you. Tyndall tells us in one of his admirable essays, that on the Sky, that "In his efforts to cross the common bourne of the known and the unknown, the effective force of the man of science must depend to a great extent upon his acquired knowledge." Your effective force will certainly depend upon your acquired knowledge. I do not mean the knowledge you have acquired here of medical science. You have but received an introduction to the studies which must follow the reception of your diplomas. But upon the thoroughness with which you have applied your minds to your studies here, will depend your ability to continue them, away from the direction of your teachers, and upon the breadth of the general knowledge which you have brought to your aid in obtaining special knowledge, and which you must continue to cultivate and broaden, will depend in a very large measure your future success and usefulness.

The broader your culture, the more varied your intelligence, the greater number of points at which you are able to come in contact with the world of letters and science, the greater will be your advantage in the race. Cultivate then a broad general intelligence, take an interest in the affairs of your community, of your state,