as I may have to make upon the state of knowledge of these gentlemen, if they be justified, in regard to any faults I may have to find, cannot be held to indicate defects in the capacity, or in the power of application of those gentlemen, but must be laid, more or less, to the account of the prevalent system of medical education.  I will tell you what has struck me—­but in speaking in this frank way, as one always does about the defects of one’s friends, I must beg you to disabuse your minds of the notion that I am alluding to any particular school, or to any particular college, or to any particular person; and to believe that if I am silent when I should be glad to speak with high praise, it is because that praise would come too close to this locality.  What has struck me, then, in this long experience of the men best instructed in physiology from the medical schools of London, is (with the many and brilliant exceptions to which I have referred), taking it as a whole, and broadly, the singular unreality of their knowledge of physiology.  Now, I use that word “unreality” advisedly:  I do not say “scanty;” on the contrary, there is plenty of it—­a great deal too much of it—­but it is the quality, the nature of the knowledge, which I quarrel with.  I know I used to have—­I don’t know whether I have now, but I had once upon a time—­a bad reputation among students for setting up a very high standard of acquirement, and I dare say you may think that the standard of this old examiner, who happily is now very nearly an extinct examiner, has been pitched too high.  Nothing of the kind, I assure you.  The defects I have noticed, and the faults I have to find, arise entirely from the circumstance that my standard is pitched too low.  This is no paradox, gentlemen, but quite simply the fact.  The knowledge I have looked for was a real, precise, thorough, and practical knowledge of fundamentals; whereas that which the best of the candidates, in a large proportion of cases, have had to give me was a large, extensive, and inaccurate knowledge of superstructure; and that is what I mean by saying that my demands went too low, and not too high.  What I have had to complain of is, that a large proportion of the gentlemen who come up for physiology to the University of London do not know it as they know their anatomy, and have not been taught it as they have been taught their anatomy.  Now, I should not wonder at all if I heard a great many “No, noes” here; but I am not talking about University College; as I have told you before, I am talking about the average education of medical schools.  What I have found, and found so much reason to lament, is, that while anatomy has been taught as a science ought to be taught, as a matter of autopsy, and observation, and strict discipline; in a very large number of cases, physiology has been taught as if it were a mere matter of books and of hearsay.  I declare to you, gentlemen, that I have often expected to be told, when I have been asked