than all other causes put together. The field, instead of being the school for the highest form of physical training and muscular development, is a treadmill in which the weak and delicate are infallibly destroyed, and the most robust gradually reduced to their capital stock of health and strength, and finally compelled to succumb. The vast amount of functional and organic disease of the heart and kidneys is ample proof were wanting. In a marching column, taken anywhere and at any time, under the present system, over 30 per cent. will be found suffering from abnormal circulation of the blood. This method exhausts the organic nervous system, and deprives vital organs of the necessary supply of power. Derangement and organic changes necessarily follow. I desire to add my testimony to the vast amount already written and spoken on the subject of cooking my companies. Company cooking ought to be held to be of the first consideration. The practice of a well-conducted company kitchen will more than pay for the hire of good cooks, and it is only necessary, to make the system effective, that the company officers should devote themselves to the subject with zeal and interest. The result in saving the numerical and physical strength of the company and regiment will tell in military success and the reputation of the officers, in addition to the advantages of a superior state of discipline and improved conditions of the soldiers as men, and especially as citizens of a republic. The want of intelligent care and conservation of the private soldier has had more to do with the prolongation of the war and the mishaps which have occurred than any one or any series of causes combined. If our men had been kept at this normal standard of vigor, they would have gone over every obstacles placed before them, precisely as they went over Missionary Ridge on the ever-memorable 25th day of November, 1863.

The demand which the war has created for educated and skillful surgeons renders the present an exceedingly opportune moment for securing just State legislation on the question of dissection. All students should be thoroughly instructed in operations and required to practice them on the dead body, until they become perfectly familiar with customary operative methods and acquire elegance and dexterity in handling the implements of this trade. Subjects for this purpose should be furnished abundantly and gratuitously. No opportunity was ever offered to the medical profession of a country to vindicate its own honor more favorable than the present. The country sees and recognizes the profession as it never did before. The profession can now assert its supremacy over all the forms of quackery and vindicate its claim to the gratitude of the nation, while it asserts its prerogative as the most enlightened and beneficent of all human institutions; can accomplish this by making its voice heard for the protection of the health and life of the common soldier. Two-thirds of the disability and deaths arise from causes capable of prevention. The church and the Christian religion are the conservators of the soul of man. The medical profession is the conservator of his body, which is the "Temple of the Holy Ghost." The tendency of physical exhaustion, which is physical despair, is to mental and spiritual despair the most fruitful source of crime.

It is through these channels (dimly indicated) the profession can exercise a part of its function, as the promoter of true civilization