Your name, illustrious Sire, will be handed down to posterity and will turn out an eternal botheration to schoolma'ams when they pass their examination; and both of us, when, with the assistance of my medical brethren, we have shed off this mortal clay, will form a constellation in the sky, called Major Ursus, or the Bromleyades.

At this moment begins a new era in the history of man, an epoch that even reverses some laws of nature heretofore considered of universal power.

Most illustrious Collega, you will recollect a private conversation once held in this sacred room when you justly remarked that we could pay our debts by mental powers. Colonel Hawes then said that Archimedes, a Syracusan philosopher, who received his name from the Archimedean screw, has established the law that the strongest man could not lift his own body, and that even our Collega Beverly Cole, when shipwrecked, could not lift himself out of the ocean by his scalp-lock, but required a boat

79 to save his valuable life. You will recall that important discussion and will feel proud of this victory, which Tommy Newcomb would call a victory of mind over

matter.

NIGHT-DREAMS are private property,they belong to the individual; but daydreams are public property, and belong to the century, or a certain stage of social and scientific development. The day-dream one hundred years ago was the philosopher's stone and the transmutation of metals. It is a remarkable anachronism that in this enlightened age the dream of the transmutation of metals has been revived in Chile by Mr. Paraf, who persuaded the unsophisticated natives of that country to buy stock in an enterprise to transmute copper into silver. Now, we all know that gold and silver can be changed, but they cannot be transmuted. Silver, it is true, is a metal that dissolves readily in alcoholic fluids and precipitates out of this solution on the tip of the

nose in the shape of copper; but this copper is the product of a vital, not a metallurgical, process.

The dreams of our own age turn chiefly upon vital processes. There is another conundrum which we strive to solve, and that is the origin of organic life. We look no more for the transmutation of metals, but for the transmutation of plants or animals into other species; but the laws of our Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals have put a fine on Darwinian experiments. We even suppose ourselves the victim of some transmutative process from a rather doubtful ancestry, and some prominent members of the medical fraternity seek with great care and perseverance for a connecting link wherewith to excuse their own personal appearance. But there exists no connecting link, for we are entirely distinct from all other types of creation by one faculty-that of smoking tobacco. The idea that the clouds are produced by the angels smoking tobacco is exploded; it is in direct